How to know when users is trying to save a file

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Hi there

Basically im trying to create a background service which is activated only when user saves a file of a particular format. Do anybody know how i might be able to do so?

thanks in adv

Posted 1-May-10 5:37am

NapCrisis

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Thank you Dmitry Vitkovsky ... ill try it out

ok yea. i tried the first solution you provided, was able to watch process but could not find the file.

ok ill try your solution too
thanks alot!

Posted 1-May-10 20:30pm

NapCrisis

Updated 2-May-10 1:24am

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Solution 4

wow thanks for the article, Michel Godfroid
i needed that

Posted 2-May-10 1:21am

NapCrisis

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Michel Godfroid · Accepted Answer · 2010-05-01T20:58:00

Do you want to monitor a particular file extension, or a specific pattern in the file?
If it's a file pattern, you'll have to install a filter driver on top of the filesystem driver.
If it's a file extension, you could also use a filter driver, but the easier way is to use the FileSystemWatcher components.
Read up on this.[^]
Note that you can only monitor file systems which support monitoring. This normally includes all locally mounted file systems, and network drives where the server is running on Microsoft Technology ( So no Appleshare, NFS, consumer SAN, etc...)

Dimitri Witkowski · Accepted Answer · 2010-05-01T06:21:00

There's several techniques to do that. One of them is to monitor _InstanceModificationEvent in WMI, here's a sample how to monitor modifications of notepad.exe:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee156569.aspx[^]

/Edit MG:
The function you refer to monitors process instances, not files, and cannot be restricted to file types or formats.
Edit MG/
Please sorry me, I just gave an idea of how to do this. Here's the code sample:

C#

class Program {
    static void Main(string[] args) {
        string wql = "SELECT * FROM __InstanceCreationEvent WITHIN 1 WHERE TargetInstance ISA 'CIM_DataFile' And TargetInstance.Drive = 'D:' AND TargetInstance.Extension = 'txt'";
        ManagementEventWatcher watcher = new ManagementEventWatcher(wql);
        while (true) {
            ManagementBaseObject ev = watcher.WaitForNextEvent();
            Console.WriteLine("*** File created: {0} ***", ((ManagementBaseObject)ev["TargetInstance"])["Description"]);
            foreach (PropertyData prop in ((ManagementBaseObject) ev["TargetInstance"]).Properties) {
                Console.WriteLine(prop.Name + ": " + prop.Value);
            }
        }
    }
}

How to know when users is trying to save a file

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