delphi - How to change file association programmatically without require elevation

Question

How to change file association programmatically when the user does not have admin/elevated rights (Win XP, Vista, 7)? Any ideas about how to work around this? Basically I would like to keep my application as lite as it is now (it doesn't need elevated rights to install and run). At the moment I offer a GUI interface where the user can change the file association, but if the user has limited rights all it does is to show a message that it cannot do that and it explains to it how to activate the "Run this program as administrator" box then restart the program. If the user has the rights, then I just change the association.

There is a better way to do it and stay 'lite'?

Answer 1

In Windows (since windows 2000) you're allowed to have system-wide file association, which require elevated privileges to be set, and per user file associations.

If you want to stay lite, make a per_user file association and that's it.

Take a look on this article: Changes in File Types and File Association Features in Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003.