Searching and Listing Files of Selected Drive in WPF

Introduction

First let me introduce what this article does. This article introduces how to search the files of your drive and list the results in a Data Grid View. Let me explain step-by-step how to do that.

First create an Entity (Simple CLR class) to contain the folder (Directory) details such as directory name, Full Name, Is Searched and so on. You might ask, if there is a default class named Directory Info already available in the .Net framework and we inherit from that rather than create all new properties and can instead add a few properties, why I have used this class. This solution can answer your question, and we will discuss it later.

The following is the code of the entity class named "My Folder".

Code

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace SearchingFileInWPF
{
public class MyFolder
{
public string Name { get; set; }
public string FullName { get; set; }
public bool Searched { get; set; }

public MyFolder()
{
this.Searched = false;
}
}
}

Create another entity named "My File" to contain the folder details, such as name, full name, file type and so on. Your question above might come in your mind, because both the FileInfo and DirectoryInfo classes are sealed and cannot be inheritable.

The following is the code of the "My File" class.

Code

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace SearchingFileInWPF
{
public class MyFile
{
public string Name { get; set; }
public string FullName { get; set; }
public long Size { get; set; }
public string Type { get; set; }
public DateTime CreateDate { get; set; }
}
}

Then add one text block control into your Windows form and set the properties as in the following code:

<TextBlock Height="31" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Margin="0,151,0,0" Name="textBlock1" Text="Search by any or all of the criteria" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="Auto" TextTrimming="None" TextWrapping="Wrap" FontWeight="Bold" FontSize="12" />

Again add one label control and set the properties as in the following:

<Label Content="All or Part of the File Name" Height="28" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="0,188,0,0" Name="label1" VerticalAlignment="Top" />

Add a Text box for entering the file name to search for and set the properties as in the following:

<TextBox Height="23" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Margin="0,209,0,0" Name="txtSearch" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="Auto" />

Again add a label control and set the properties as in the following: