NTK - Knowledge Sharing  »   How to find Skype's default account name & List of registered accounts

Just wanted to share this small contribution with NTK community members.
hope it will be useful and inspire some of you to enhance it with extra features.

Introduction & problematic
The aim of this contribution is to show how to 1.detect if Skype is installed on a PC.
If so, 2.try to retrieve the Skype's default account name (if any) and when possible 3.get the list of registered accounts.

Solutions
1 Detecting Skype's presence
The Skype default account's name is stored in a file named "shared.xml".
This file is located in C:\users\username\AppData\Roaming\Skype\. So, as the exact path we need to access depends on username, we call the NTK_SHGetSpecialFolderPath() win32 API with CSIDL_APPDATA as second argument.

FUNCTION GetSkypeDefaultAccount( void )
. . .
cFileName := NTK_SHGetSpecialFolderPath(NULL, CSIDL_APPDATA, .F.)
cFileName := cFileName + "\\Skype\\shared.xml" // This file holdes among other data, the default user ID

IF !FILE(cFileName)
   cMsgResult := "Skype is not installed on this machine."
   RETURN(cMsgResult)
ENDIF
. . .

2 Finding Skype's default account name
"shared.xml" is obviously an XML file. So this second step consists in opening shared.xml and extracting
the desired information. To do so, we use MEMOREAD() to load the whole xml file content into a string var, remove eventual invalid chars, ...

. . .
// Load the content of shared.xml into a memory var string
cString := MEMOREAD( cFileName )
IF !( LEN(cString) > 0 )
   cMsgResult := "XML content unavailable - File: "+CRLF+cFileName+CRLF+;
                 "Skype is probably not installed on this machine."
   RETURN(cMsgResult)
ENDIF

// Remove invalid chars in tag names, if any
cString := STRTRAN( cString, "<_", "[_" )   // avoid error #4: 'Invalid character as tag name'
cString := STRTRAN( cString, "</_", "[/_" ) // avoid error #4: 'Invalid character as tag name'
. . .

...........then we are able to create an xml object from this string.
Thus, we can proceed to shared.xml parsing and extract the relevant information.

. . .
// Create an XML memory object
oXmlDoc := TXmlDocument():New( cString )
IF !( oXmlDoc:nError==HBXML_ERROR_NONE )
   cMsgResult :=  "XML file parsing error #"+AllTrim(str(oXmlDoc:nError))+": "+HB_XmlErrorDesc(oXmlDoc:nError)
   RETURN(cMsgResult)
ENDIF

// Parse the XML document till the <Account> node is found
oXmlNode := oXmlDoc:findFirst( "Account" )
IF oXmlNode <> NIL
   // If found, we look for the existence if a nested node called: <Default>.
   oXmlSubNode := oXmlNode:nextInTree()   // Go to Next node
   If oXmlSubNode:cName=="Default"
      cMsgResult := "DEFAULT ACCOUNT NAME FOUND!"+CRLF+;
                    "The Skype's Default Account Name is:"+CRLF+"["+oXmlSubNode:cData+"]"
   EndIf
ENDIF
. . .

In order to find the default account's name, we first call oXmlDoc:findFirst( "Account" ) to locate the <Account> node, then we invoke oXmlNode:nextInTree() to find inside of it, the immediate <Default> subnode, where the account name is stored as a string value.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<config version="1.0" serial="42" timestamp="1489748553.11">
  <Lib>
    <Access>
      <Cookies>4100</Cookies>
      <Enabled>1</Enabled>
    </Access>
    <Account>
      <Default>myaccountname</Default>
      <UpgradeHints>0/6.18.*.*,4</UpgradeHints>
    </Account>
    <BCM>
      <_2>000010008844E7...... ect.
    </BCM>
. . .

3 Retrieving the Skype's list of account names.
The list of Skype's registered accounts is quite easy to retrieve. We just have to browse files of the C:\users\username\AppData\Roaming\Skype\ folder, then only keep trace of subdirectories that have a file named config.xml. Our GetSkypeAccountList() is in charge of that basic task.

FUNCTION GetSkypeAccountList( void )
   Local nI
   Local aSkypeAccList
   Local cMsgResult := ""

   // Get Skype's list of registered accounts, if any
   aSkypeAccList := __GetSkypeAccountList()
   IF !EMPTY(aSkypeAccList)
      cMsgResult += "Skype's list of registered accounts:"+CRLF
      cMsgResult += "------------------------------------"+CRLF
      FOR nI := 1 TO LEN(aSkypeAccList)
          cMsgResult += "["+ aSkypeAccList[nI] +"]"+CRLF
      NEXT
      cMsgResult += CRLF+CRLF  // Skip two lines
   ENDIF

RETURN(cMsgResult)

Find out more into the attached zip file.

Sources and Acknowlegments
A domain public contribution by Abbougaga Jr.
This source code for NTK-Framework has been freely inspired from an original MFC-application written by Michael Haephrati:
https://www.codeproject.com/Tips/826814/Finding-Skypes-Default-Account-Name

+1 Ab.
Thanks for the work done and for the time devoted to these step-by-step explanations.
- Chris
I just have a question:
Where could I find documention on xml objects used in your code?