How to determine if the user has administrator privileges ?

Hello Everybody,

There are ways to find out if the current user has administrator
privileges on the Win32 box.  Many windows programs do that.  I wonder
if there is an easy way to do this from inside the VW, before I start
compiling C code into  win32 EXE or DLL?

TIA,

--Mark Pirogovsky

some refs:

http://vcfaq.mvps.org/sdk/21.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q118626/

NSIS has a function that does just that,

http://nsis.sourceforge.net/IsUserAdmin

See source code at,

http://tinyurl.com/jqopc

Hope this helps,

-Boris

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-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Pirogovsky [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: Wednesday, May 03, 2006 8:11 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: How to determine if the user has administrator privileges ?

Hello Everybody,

There are ways to find out if the current user has administrator
privileges on the Win32 box.  Many windows programs do that.  I wonder
if there is an easy way to do this from inside the VW, before I start
compiling C code into  win32 EXE or DLL?

TIA,

--Mark Pirogovsky

some refs:

http://vcfaq.mvps.org/sdk/21.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q118626/

> There are ways to find out if the current user has administrator
> privileges on the Win32 box.  Many windows programs do that.  I wonder
> if there is an easy way to do this from inside the VW, before I start
> compiling C code into  win32 EXE or DLL?
>

Hi Mark,

while there is an API for that in Win2k and XP (at least there should be
a 'IsUserAnAdmin' function), however it is missing(!) in my own Win2k
installation. Whatever the reason is, determining if an user is admin
can be *hell*, especially if you want to do it right and fight with the
weird MS philosophy of ad-hoc API design ....

I chose to do it brute force and simple: If setting a registry entry in
a locked area of the registry fails, the user is NOT an admin:

WinNTSystemSupport>>userIsAdmin
    "Answer true, if the user has Administrator rights. This is not
supported
     by all versions of Win2K or XP, so we need a hack here."
    | path key value admin |
    path := #( 'Hardware' 'Description' ).
    key := 'TestAdmin'.
    value := 'TestValue'.
    "Only an admin can write to this path:"
    self setRegistry: #HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE path: path key: key value:
value type: #REG_SZ.
    admin := self getRegistry: #HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE path: path name: key
ifAbsent: nil.
    self removeRegistry: #HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE path: path name: key
ifAbsent: nil.
    ^admin notNil and:[ admin = value ]


I'm not sure if the registry setting methods are custom, but it should
be no problem to use the built-in methods.

HTH
Andre