How do I get the application data path in Windows using C++?

Question

I looked all over the internet and there doesn't seem to be a decent solution that I could find. I want to be able to programmatically in C++ obtain the path "%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data" that explorer can translate into a real path.

Can I do this without relying on third-party code?

Answer 1

Use SHGetFolderPath with CSIDL_COMMON_APPDATA as the CSIDL.

TCHAR szPath[MAX_PATH];
if (SUCCEEDED(SHGetFolderPath(NULL, CSIDL_COMMON_APPDATA, NULL, 0, szPath)))
{
    //....
}

Answer 2

Just to suppliment interjay's answer

1. I had to include shlobj.h to use SHGetFolderPath.

2. Often you may need to read a file from appdata, to do this you need to use the pathAppend function (shlwapi.h is needed for this).

#include <shlwapi.h>
#pragma comment(lib,"shlwapi.lib")
#include "shlobj.h"

TCHAR szPath[MAX_PATH];
// Get path for each computer, non-user specific and non-roaming data.
if ( SUCCEEDED( SHGetFolderPath( NULL, CSIDL_COMMON_APPDATA, NULL, 0, szPath ) ) )
{
    // Append product-specific path
    PathAppend( szPath, _T("\\My Company\\My Product\\1.0\\") );
}

See here for more details.

Answer 3

you can also read the value from the registry

path = HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders

key = Common AppData