XNA Content Directory Iteration

Question

Are there any objects or functions that can iterate through the files in a set directory in XNA Content?

I have a set of images in a directory in my game's content, but as the project goes on, I will be adding more. However, I don't want to have to go and add a line of code every time I add a new image, it would be much better if I was able to just iterate through every file in the directory and load them into an array. Is there any way to do this?

Answer 1

You can use this handy extension method

public static class Extension Methods
{
        public static List<T> LoadContentFolder<T>(this ContentManager contentManager, string contentFolder)
        {
            DirectoryInfo dir = new DirectoryInfo(contentManager.RootDirectory + "/" + contentFolder);
            if (!dir.Exists)
                throw new DirectoryNotFoundException();
            List<T> result = new List<T>();

            FileInfo[] files = dir.GetFiles("*.*");
            foreach (FileInfo file in files)
            {
                result.Add(contentManager.Load<T>(contentFolder + "/" + file.Name.Split('.')[0]));
            }
            return result;
        }
}

Remove the "this" keyword from the constuctor if you dont want to extend the class. You can use it like so:

Dictionary<string,Texture2D> folderContent = Content.LoadContentFolder<Texture2D>("FolderName");

FolderName is just a subfolder within your content folder

And access by doing folderContent["MyAssetName"]