CD-ROM Drive Letter (Windows)

[marija]

Can anyone tell me if there is a function in FM or plug-in to get the drive letter of the CD-ROM drive in windows?

thank you!

[Brendon Skinner]

What exactly are you trying to do, because I know one way to do it but it will not work for every contingency.

[Rigsby]

I can only think of one way of doing this that might work, which would be to use an import or open script step, point it to your CD then select remember options. In this way you haven’t really taught FM the letter as such but it knows where the CD is.

My main question would be why on Earth you would want to? The only reason I could think of, would be for launching standard applications, perhaps a router or telephone book, etc. But for this there are much more in-depth and more elegant solutions.

Rigsby

[marija]

Yes, I guess telling you why might inspire some other options! Sorry.

I'm creating a run-time CD. I determined that images should not be imported, but referenced because they make the db huge and make the forms load very slowly (I have images as my backgrounds in some cases). The images, of course, are kept on the CD.

When I did the references, the db size decreased and it ran quickly.

This CD is cross-platform. Mac side works fine. I am concerned about when a user's CD drive is set to a different letter, the images do not display. I referenced the images to the E drive, just because that's what my development machine is set to.

One person suggested that I have multiple copies of the database on the CD, each referencing a different CD-drive, and at least I'll hit the most common configurations. I would prefer not to have to do this...

I WELCOME any suggestions!!! Thanks.

[SteveB]

One sure way is to use WinBatch from Wilsonware, as it will return the drive letter and folder that your EXE is running from. Its a great product from Wilsonware (www.windowware.com). It can also return a list of all the CD-Roms on a system. However, interfacing WinBatch with FM requires a bit of ingenuity. I use the Troi file plugin to create a command file and then launch my WinBatch routine(s) to interpret the commands. Not clean, but it works. By the way, WB has over 500 functions that can be compiled into an EXE.

[ October 29, 2001: Message edited by: Steveinvegas ]