Custom Templates folder via Windows Domain policy GPO

[p10n]

My client uses a Affinity software on a few Windows PCs (in a AD Domain) with different user accounts. The have a custom folder for their templates on a network drive.

Where are the registry settings for adding such a folder? I found HKLM\Serif\Affinity\Designer\1 but that does not seem to contain anything like such preferences. Nothing in HKCU.

Looks like all this is stored in <UserProfile>\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Designer\1.0\preferences.dat – which seems to be a binary file unfortunately.

How is this supposed to be administered in a networked environment?

EDIT: Ah, I just found AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Designer\1.0\Settings\TemplateSettings.xml – I guess this one is my friend!

If I overwrite this file for all users, would I just overwrite any custom folders the users might have added, or are there more settings that I would kill?

Edited August 2, 2024 by p10n
Found the file

[GarryP]

I don’t know if I am misunderstanding your requirements but it sounds like they don’t need to go into the Registry for this.

If each user uses menu “File → New” then selects the Templates pane (left of the dialog), they can each use the “Add Folder” button to add the shared folder as a source of their templates.

Or am I missing an important detail?

[p10n]

Well yes of course that is the manual way. But I want to alleviate users from doing that manually on each PC (searching for the folder, adding it).

We do have computers to automate stupid and error-prone tasks, don't we?

[DWright]

You can manually edit the TemplateSettings.xml file to add additional locations and then deploy the edited file to the other PC's so you do not need to manually add the folders on each PC. 

[p10n]

Thanks for your reply! Yes this is what I have in mind.

Are there any other settings that might get stored in this file (that I would overwrite), or does the file really only contain the list of custom template folders?

[DWright]

This file only contains the location of the template locations.