OK - this is a very oddball scenario, and I am having problems trying to get to the bottom of it.
I have 2 applications (lets just say app1 and app2) and a text file (txt1).
App1 and txt1 reside in the same directory (say C:\APP), but app2 resides in a subdirectory of app1's directory (C:\APP\SUB).
When App1 launches, it reads some stuff from txt1 using the standard:
AssignFile(txtFile,'txt1.txt');
Reset(txtFile);
No issues with that. However, when App2 launches App1 via a shellexecute command:
shellexecute(0,'open','..\app1.exe',nil,nil,SW_SHOW);
App1 cannot seem to see the text file. I get a response saying 'Specified File Could Not Be Found'. Odd.
I did debug by adding:
if not fileexists('txt1.txt') then
showMessage(ExtractFilePath(application.exename));
And this shows the correct file path of app1 (itself), so, why then, does the 'reset' command produce the 'Could not find....' error? I am wondering if employing shellexecute is making the application somehow think it is executing from the sub-directory as opposed to the actual directory that it is in?
I understand that the easiest solution is to simply add the file path to the front of every file my 'app1' is opening (I tried it and yes, it does work correctly), however, there are in reality, hundreds of files this main application accesses through a similar method (be they txt, ini or dll's) i.e. assigning the file based on the fact it is in the same directory as the application, therefore, not setting the fully qualified file path, so changing (and maintaining) them all is not something we would be interested in doing at this time.
Has anyone ever seen something like this before? Is there a better way for me to have App2 launch App1 other than ShellExecute? There are no parameters or anything to be passed to App1, I just need it to launch.
Thanks for your time - let me know if you need anything else on this one!
lpDirectory optional argument of ShellExecute function allows client to specify a working directory for the program to be executed.