Monday, March 26, 2012

Creating a SendTo Shortcut through MSI

If you want to create a SendTo shortcut through MSI, then if you just add the shortcut in MSI in SendTo folder, it will not work. Even if you get the shortcut there in every user profile, still it will not work. To make a SendTo shortcut, you need to create it on the fly, which means that shortcut should be created from original exe. To solve this issue for one of my application, WinSCP, I wrote the below VBScript and placed it in %ALLUSERPROFILE%\WinSCP folder. Then I created an Active setup to call this VBScript.


Set Shell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
ShortcutPath = Shell.SpecialFolders("SendTo")
Set link = Shell.CreateShortcut(ShortcutPath & "\WinSCP (for upload).lnk")
link.Arguments = "/upload"
link.Description = "WinScp"
link.HotKey = ""
link.IconLocation = "C:\Program Files (x86)\WinSCP\WinSCP.exe,0"
link.TargetPath = "C:\Program Files (x86)\WinSCP\WinSCP.exe"
link.WindowStyle = 3
link.WorkingDirectory = "C:\Program Files (x86)\WinSCP"
link.Save


To delete this SendTo shortcut, I wrote another script and added an active setup registry key through CA during Remove sequence to run this script.


dim filesys
Set filesys = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
sup = oShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings ("%APPDATA%")
WinSCPlnk= sup & "\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo\WinSCP (for upload).lnk"
If filesys.FileExists(WinSCPlnk) Then
filesys.DeleteFile WinSCPlnk
End If


Also remember to make the above component as permanent, because you do not want to delete this vbs file at uninstall of application.

3 comments:

Harshraj said...

creating a non advertized SendTo shortcut worked in my case

Piyush Nasa said...

Yup, It creates Non-advertised shortcuts. You cannot create advertised shortcut through script. MSI does that best.
Cheers..

chaitanya said...

Thats for the script piyush.. It worked as Non advertised shortcut for me as well