Create shortcut on Windows

[KochiyaOcean]

Our project is trying to use toast notification on Windows, which requires a shortcut with AppUserModelID on Windows 8.1.
Is it possile to provide a method to create a shortcut with customizable AppUserModelID?
Similar to gui.App.createShortcut on the bottom of https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js/wiki/Notification

[felixrieseberg]

It's not a bad idea, I can build that. @kevinsawicki: The code is fairly simple, I'm just not sure which object should host the method. Thoughts?

[kevinsawicki]

Sorry, just want to get more context here, how would this be different than the app. setAppUserModelId API http://electron.atom.io/docs/v0.36.5/api/app/#app-setappusermodelid-id-windows ?

[felixrieseberg]

The only addition would be to have an API that automatically creates a shortcut on the user's start menu. From my point of view, there's no definite need to put it into Electron - in theory, an external module and some documentation here would probably already do the trick for most people*.

EDIT: *Happy to write said documentation, of course.

[kevinsawicki]

Yeah, I thought https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows handled this correctly already so I'm not sure if a core API is needed here. I'd be curious what others think.

[anaisbetts]

Squirrel.Windows does indeed already create shortcuts with AppUserModelID set, it's always:

com.squirrel.{YOUR NUGET PACKAGE ID}.{YOUR EXE NAME MINUS DOT EXE}

So:

com.squirrel.atom.Atom

or

com.squirrel.slack.Slack

[anaisbetts]

One thing that's been On My List is to have Electron itself just automatically set your App User Model ID for you if you're Squirrel-installed, something like:

1. If "{My Executable's Directory}/../Update.exe" exists
2. Get the name of "{My Executable's Directory}/../.." which is the NuGet Package ID
3. Combine it with the executable name, bingo bango, we can build an AppUserModelID

If someone submitted a PR to that effect it would be amaaaaazing

[KochiyaOcean]

I don't want to use Squirrel so I forked from https://github.com/j201/windows-shortcuts and add set appUserModelId function to it. This module works fine now so I'll close this issue. Thanks for your help 😃
https://github.com/KochiyaOcean/windows-shortcuts

[Chaaaaap]

Does the AppUserModelID have to be "com.squirrel.xx.yy" in order for Squirrel to correctly update pins and shortcuts?