Re: [lmi] File extension not added--common "save" dialog in msw11

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Wed, 8 Feb 2023 19:38:58 +0000 Greg Chicares <gchicares@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

GC> If we could show end users that excel and word behave the same
GC> way, then we could say lmi shouldn't do what ms is unwilling to do.
GC> But that's not the case here: from our end users' POV, lmi is just
GC> broken, and they want it fixed.

 As an aside, I'd like to note that if we do always append the extension,
it will make lmi behave differently from Notepad because it actually
doesn't _always_ append it, but only does it unless if the file doesn't
have any "known" extension, where "known" means that a key with this
extension name exists in the registry HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive.

 So if you enter a file name "picture.of.my.cat", Notepad won't append .txt
to it because .cat is a well-known extension for Microsoft catalog files.
While "picture.of.my.dog" will be saved as "picture.of.my.dog.txt". Unless
you make a typo and mistype "dog" like "dpg", which turns out to be another
known extension and so this would prevent ".txt" from being appended.

 However if the users only use Excel and not Notepad, they might never
realize this because Excel does seem to always append its extension to the
file being saved. But at least with my version of Excel this results in a
bug: if you have a file foo.cat and enter foo.cat when saving Excel
spreadsheet, it asks you if you want to overwrite the existing file
foo.cat, but if you say "yes", it doesn't overwrite it but creates
foo.cat.xslx file in the same directory. You might think this is not too
bad, but it gets worse: if you remove foo.cat, open another spreadsheet and
save it as foo.cat, Excel silently overwrites the existing foo.cat.xsls
without asking.

 Copying this behaviour seems really undesirable, so if we do implement
extension appending ourselves, we're going to have to ask for confirmation
before overwriting an existing file ourselves too. This is not ideal
neither because it may look different from the Windows confirmation dialog,
but still better than overwriting the existing files silently.

 Regards,
VZ

pgpsrMJqXuQxs.pgp
Description: PGP signature