How Do I Close Any Open File

I want to be able to be able to close any open file. How do I do this?

Idea #1 = I've been puzzling over the Help article for Lock and Unlock statements. It would appear that it is possible to close any file in theory? I cant get it to work.

Idea #2 = If I could be certain that the current window is displaying the open filename (or if I could force this window to be the active window), I could use SendKeys to send Alt + F4 to close the file? (Not the best solution but if Idea #1 doesn't work...)



Below is what I've been playing around with.

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Kills a process based on it's title...

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Title needs to be an Exact match - there are alternatives to search for a Window based on a partial title, but just took the easiest option (I had the code already).

This kills a process, not just close the application - there will be no option to Save or any other dialogs that may be displayed by the application, before it is terminated.

Originally Posted by cytop

Kills a process based on it's title...

Interesting. +1

(I am looking to close an open file, not kill the whole program however I am open to alternative solutions on this thread)

Originally Posted by cytop

Title needs to be an Exact match - there are alternatives to search for a Window based on a partial title, but just took the easiest option (I had the code already).

An exact match may be a problem. I am primarily interested in solving the close file concept for PDFs. And depending on the system I am using, the default PDF software is Sumatra, FoxIt or Adobe Reader. Now the first one uses the filename as the window title. But the latter twos title is "[FileName] - [ProgramName]".

Originally Posted by cytop

This kills a process, not just close the application - there will be no option to Save or any other dialogs that may be displayed by the application, before it is terminated.

Understood. If I do end up going down the Kill Process route (instead of Close File) then I don't care about saving files before killing. Thanks for pointing that out though.

You can use WMI also for a brute force approach:

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For a document specific approach, you'd want to loop through the open windows, get the caption and then probably send a WM_CLOSE message, or similar. Or if you know the full file name, perhaps simply GetObject.

Originally Posted by romperstomper

You can use WMI also for a brute force approach:

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For a document specific approach, you'd want to loop through the open windows, get the caption and then probably send a WM_CLOSE message, or similar. Or if you know the full file name, perhaps simply GetObject.

Thanks for the suggestions Rory.

I don't see how the first two will work for me (1. requires the program process name - which I cant be programatically sure of unless I get stuck into registry detection of the process exe. 2. requires the name of the window title - which I cant be sure of - unless I assume that the open file will always contain the filename somewhere in the window title? and then loop through the titles looking for wildcard filename wildcard?)

I am looking into suggestion 3 now. This sounds like the best solution, I just need to solve the error messages on setting the object from the fullname. (Error 424 on trying to set object on open PDF) (UPDATE: I'm not the only one - http://www.vbaexpress.com/forum/show...ct-not-working )

Why do you need your code to close a PDF it didn't open?

Originally Posted by romperstomper

Why do you need your code to close a PDF it didn't open?

Hmmm...Good question.

I initially thought that if the PDF was already open, I would need to close it and reopen it in order to ensure that the code had full control and window focus before continuing.

However upon testing this morning, it seems that even if the file is already open, the rest of the code works just fine. In terms of window focus that is. I want to close the PDF once the code has finished - not essential I know.


UPDATE:
It may help if you can see what I want to use this close file code for? See attached. (And yes the attached is working for me but it assumes that the PDF software is Foxit. So it will fail on the other systems I work on)