CDir (MT5) - a class for getting directory contents

Related: Log4mql (MT5) - another powerful library for MetaTrader 5 traders.

Sometimes it is necessary to go beyond the sandbox and read the contents to check the existence of a file or directory in the file system. Also, you may need to find a file or directory attributes, file size, creation time, last access or writing. The following code shows an example of how to solve these problems:

Also recommended: Logging Class for both MQ L4 and MQ L5 - similar library with strong performance on MetaTrader 5.

A standard prologue and description of variables, as well as a link to the source code of the #include <WIN_API\Dir_API.mqh> include class is am implicit instruction to the compiler that it should look for the file in the folder \MQL5\Include\WIN_API. You are free to change this link, depending on your preference in the organization of work with include files in accordance with the .
As we can see, the string variable
path
contains the path to the folder, which is two levels above the standard location of the running terminal directory, and we (if the option is not used) obtain the path to the directory that contains the user data of all the client terminals of that user.
A thoughtful reader would say that we do extra movements - that it could be enough to get one level up in order to go to the right directory. But what if we want to navigate to another folder, for example Crashes or Tester? This is a more instructive example.
Let us get back to the example code.
Having created a class instance, we receive the number of element (files and subdirectories) in the
total
variable. By organizing a loop we can print the list of directories of terminals (skipping shared directories). Let us illustrate access to the instance data by accessing a copy of the working data structure of the
File
class.
The example of printing part of directory contents (using the selection of elements containing the M letter at the beginning) demonstrates other methods for working with the class members.
In the following part of code, we check the existence of the specific file and find out its length.
The test script ends with an example of using references to an instance of the class storing the directory contents element:
I have no doubt that most readers will use this method for accessing class data in their work.
Additional information might be needed for understanding attributes:
I hope that this example and the class itself will be useful to you.
Enjoy it!

You may also like: Matrix operations library - excellent alternative for library users on MetaTrader 5.