Replace save file dialog opened by any program by a customized save file dialog

Question

I am working on a Version Control/File Sync System for Windows. It would be great to have a checkbox at the bottom of the classical save file dialog with the option to check/uncheck for my file versioning.

Is it possible to listen for opened save file dialogs by any program (word etc.) and replace/override that dialog with a customized one (with an additional checkbox)?

If the checkbox is checked, another window should pop-up where the user could enter some additional metadata. After that the data is stored in a local database.

I already worked with the approach by dmihailescu (link provided) but it's very complex and I do not know how to modify that example to listen for opened save file dialogs by other programs.

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/19566/Extend-OpenFileDialog-and-SaveFileDialog-the-easy?msg=4779306#xx4779306xx

Another approach is to use the FileSystemWatcher but that's very expensive to watch the whole system and it's not very comfortable because the user has to be asked for any created file if he/she wants to version control it.

I hope someone could help me to solve that problem or has some additional tips / approaches.

Thank you.

Edit: Use-case

A user has to write a documentation and creates a new word-doc. When he/she clicks the Save as menu entry of word, my customized save file dialog should pop-up with a checkbox at the bottom, if this file should be versioned or not. If the checkbox is "active" a new window should appear where the user could enter additional metadata. After that the data should be stored in local database.

In my case, only the metadata (like the path etc.) should be stored in the database. Let's suppose a user stores the same file in two different directotries (one file is "older" and one file is the current one). If the user opens an older version of this file, my system should recognize that a "newer" one is already stored in another place and synchronize those files.

That should just be a very easy example.

Answer 1

You have two pieces of functionality: save and version-control. Both of the tasks are actually rather complicated. Therefore you shouldn't mix them. You better off using standard Windows API to save file and do not change that. Think about how you'd support several different Windows releases and how painful that would be.

I assume you have your own UI, and do not integrate with, say, Windows Explorer (like Tortoise Svn or Dropbox). In this case you can do version-control magic first and then just save the end file using standard API.

If you do integrate with Windows Explorer, I suggest you to have a look at Tortoise svn source code.