I'm trying to develop a solver for good ole' Minesweeper, but running into a hitch.
Environment: I setup Python 3.4.6 (x64) and am using Pywinauto 0.61 and the old Windows 7 Minesweeper from Winaero's "Windows 7 games for Windows 10".
Problem: I can't seem to detect dialog items nor interact with them using Pywinauto, yet I can tell from inspect they are clearly there.
1) Minesweeper
2) Inspect.exe showing the process ID - which matches pywinauto's - and all relevant children
3) Results of Print_Control_Identifiers() on the window and the child. Lacking the children shown in 2)
My code is as such:
app = pywinauto.Application().connect(class_name="Minesweeper")
mswpr = app.window(title="Minesweeper")
mswpr.print_control_identifiers()
mswpr.child_window().print_control_identifiers()
After fiddling with this for hours, I'm still not sure what I'm missing. I expect to see a list of groups, a menu bar, and a title bar to appear in one of the outputs (given inspect's results): acknowledging they are recognized by pywinauto, yet I'm given nothing. I am sure the program is locating the right process and window, given the process ID and window dimensions match between inspect and pywinauto.
Suspicions: The first is that this, being a Microsoft product, is simply inaccessible through the traditional means of Pywinauto. Another idea is that I see conflicting UIA and win32 types, alternating between backends in Pywinauto yielded nothing. I've also attempted to directly access dialogs by name with the code I was able to determine via inspect.exe to no success. My question is, what could I be missing?
Thank you for any clues or suggestions.
Related
Windows 8.1 , ConEmu 170316 [32] {Preview}
I have multiple Conemu instances running, where each instance equals one "workspace".
I would like to be able to switch to this workspaces with autohotkey or pywinauto. However they require a criterion for selecting the right window, and usually I employ a combination of window title and or window class type.
Is there any setting in conemu that can help me achieve this criterion identifiation for window selection? If there isn't, I will have to write the PID down somewhere when I start the conem windows, then read it to bring up the right window at window activation time.
I can say only about pywinauto. When you call app = Application().start('ConEmu64.exe') pywinauto already remembers process PID and every new WindowSpecification object assumes this PID. Of course, it's true only if you're controlling start of ConEmu (or any other app). More details can be found in the Getting Started Guide.
Method app.connect(title="some unique tab name") will also remember the PID in app object. But if there are few instances with the same title, you need to disambiguate it using found_index=0 criterion, for example. Or right click on the tab and choose "Rename tab..." context menu item which changes the window title.
I took a short look at ConEmu. Toolbars and tabs are visible even to Spy++. So the most of actions can be automated. Just not sure about console inside a tab. If you want to type some commands, it's much better to use standard Python module subprocess because GUI automation for console programs looks very very strange. ;)
As per faq (ty Maximus) - see option 1:
1) Use -title “Window name” switch to explicitly set window title of new ConEmu instance. The example below starts new ConEmu window with title My server and ssh to your.server.com inside. Does not matter if you run another tab, or several tabs from task, the ConEmu window title remains My server. So you may rely on the title for selecting the window with class name VirtualConsoleClass.
Option 2 is also valid. I'd have to (1) create a config, and (2) hardcode the hashed id in ahk / pywinauto. Just using the window title name seems the right thing to do in my case, the app id setup seems overkill
2) Windows 7 introduced AppUserModelID. ConEmu uses executable path name and some switches (like -config, -loadcfgfile, -quake) to create a hash to form AppID, which you may see in the About / SysInfo. Current version shows 1d5372066082f23b41ba6aa278e56e9d::163. The trailing ::163 depicts ConEmu internal protocol version which may (and most probably would) be changed in the future. The hash itself is expected to be unchanged. You may query the ID from running ConEmu process using Windows API function GetApplicationUserModelId.
Thank you Maximus!
I want to retrieve information from a tooltip in the system tray programmatically.
The image shows the tooltip.
Now, I found that by using Microsoft's inspect.exe, which is "a Windows-based tool that enables you select any UI element and view the element's accessibility data", that it is in theory possible to retrieve this value programmatically.
Hovering over the the pandora icon in the toolbar shows me the following properties
It shows one property "name" that contains the exact data I need. I'm unsure how to retrieve this value programmatically using the win32api. I have a hwnd to the pandora icon already.
Additionally, a different ui spy tool, UiSpy.exe calls this same property "helpText" (different song name :p)
I tried using getWindowText(pandoraSystrayIconHwnd) but that returns a different text. Does anyone know what this "name" value is, and how I can retrieve it using the win32api? It should be possible because inspect.exe is an external program that can access the data somehow
I'm doing this in Python, as the target application is written in Python already.
These spy apps are probably using Active Accessibility and/or UI Automation.
You can try calling AccessibleObjectFromWindow on the toolbar HWND or AccessibleObjectFromPoint if you care about the mouse position and then call IAccessible::get_accName.
Keep in mind that the classname and window hierarchy of the tray icon toolbar is undocumented.
If you only care about Pandora and not other applications then I would strongly suggest that you look for other alternatives first. Perhaps they have a hidden window with the title etc.
If you don't mind hacks then you could take a look at TraySaver, it is open source and knows the internal format of the data stored for each icon in the tray toolbar. Keep in mind that it is pretty old and might not work on newer versions of Windows. If you go down this path (and I don't recommend it) then you have to remember that you need to support both 32-bit and 64-bit Explorer.
Maybe GUI automation library pywinauto could help you. It uses Win32 API or UI Automation under the hood (by your choice). Core concept is described in the Getting Started Guide.
Method .window_text() returns exactly the same as Name property shows in Inspect.exe.
To interact with tray area icons you can use this example on StackOverflow.
I'm trying to write a program than will detect when my mouse pointer will change icon and automatically send out a mouse click. Is there a better way to do this than to take screenshots and parse the image for the mouse icon?
EDIT:
I'm running my program on windows 7.
I'm trying to learn some image processing and make a simple flash game i made automated.
Rules: when the curses changes shape, click to get a point.
Also what imaging modules for python will allow you to take a specific size screenshot not just the whole screen? This question has moved to a new thread: "Taking Screen shots of specific size"
The way to do this in Windows is to install either a global message hook with SetWindowsHookEx or SetWinEventHook. (Alternatively, you could build a DLL that embeds Python and hooks into the browser or its Flash wrapper app and do it less intrusively from within the app, but that's much more work.)
The message you want is WM_SETCURSOR. Note that this is the message sent by Windows to the app to ask whether it wants to change the cursor, not a message sent when the cursor changes. So, IIRC, you will want to put a WH_CALLWNDPROC and a WH_CALLWNDPROCRET and check GetCursorInfo before and after to see if the app has done so.
So, how do you do this from Python? Honestly, if you don't already know both win32api and friends from the pywin32 package, and how to write Windows message procs in some language, you probably don't want to. If you do want to, I'd start off with the (abandoned) pyHook project from UNC Assist. Even if you can't get it working, it's full of useful source code.
You should also search SO for [python] SetWinEventHook and [python] SetWindowsHookEx, and google around a bit; there are some examples out there (I even wrote one here somewhere…)
You can look at higher-level wrapper frameworks like pywinauto and winGuiAuto, but as far as I know, none of them has much help for capturing events.
I believe there are other tools, maybe AutoIt, that have all the functionality you need, but not in Python module. (AutoIt, for example, has its own VB-like scripting language instead.)
I am trying to send a couple basic text commands to a flash program running in Firefox on Windows 7, but I am unable to get pywinauto working for me.
Right now, I have just been able to accomplish the very basic task of connecting to Firefox plugin-container by directing it to the path using the following code:
from pywinauto import application
app = application.Application()
app.connect_(path = r"c:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\plugin-container.exe")
The next step seems to be something to the effect of:
app.plugin-container.Edit.TypeKeys('Text')
However, I can't reference the plugin-container window using '.plugin-container', or any combination of those words. I have tried adding a title variable to the connect_() function and I have tried everything I can think of to find out how to type the command.
The example I am basing this off of is the notepad sample:
from pywinauto import application
app.start_(ur"notepad.exe")
app.Notepad.Edit.TypeKeys(u"{END}{ENTER}SendText d\xf6\xe9s "
u"s\xfcpp\xf4rt \xe0cce\xf1ted characters!!!", with_spaces = True)
It doesn't matter to me if I use pywinauto or Firefox. If it is any easier to do this using a different module or Internet Explorer, I'm on board for whatever accomplishes the task. I am using Python version 2.7.2 and would prefer it over any version changes.
Any help at all is appreciated. I am pretty lost in all this.
As the author of pywinauto - I think you are going to have a hard time. pywinauto only really helps with standard windows controls, and I don't think that flash controls are implemented as standard windows controls (Buttons, Edit boxes, etc).
OFf the top of my head - I would think Sikuli may be a better starting point (http://sikuli.org/).
Another option may be 'http://code.google.com/p/flash-selenium/' - I just googled for "automating flash input" - and it turned up in one of the first articles I clicked.
Thanks for trying pywinauto - I just don't think it is best suited for Flash automation.
Following the example at http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.general/541418, I've succeeded in creating a callable class for balloon tooltips, but the greater complexities of that code elude me when it comes to customization. I browsed a bit of how it works through msdn, but being a novice at more windows-esque languagues like c and vb, etc. I was unable to make much sense of it.
So I ask ye snakely academics:
Things I'd like to be able to do with that code aside from the standard icon, title, text:
Perform actions based on clicking the tooltip
Modify the tooltip that pops up over the icon in the system tray after loading it (to reflect changing values)
Multiple lines? (Not sure if this can even be done, really)
More information on other things you could do in a windows 7 environment versus XP (which seems to be what this was written for).
Ideally I'd get some sort of return value or some semblance of an event when the tooltip is clicked so that I could run some code, but currently I'm importing that code as a module and calling at various times, so I'm not sure how to handle clicks outside of the popup code itself...
Information on handling these things with python seems quite scarce. Thanks in advance.
Perform actions based on clicking the tooltip
Whats the problem OnTaskbarNotify? Hock yourself in there.
Modify the tooltip that pops up over the icon in the system tray after loading it (to reflect changing values)
Probably not, I am not sure about the WinAPI here. I haven't seen it in the wild, so...
Multiple lines? (Not sure if this can even be done, really)
With most WinAPI, just insert a \n in the string.
More information on other things you could do in a windows 7 environment versus XP (which seems to be what this was written for).
LOTS... But that is a bit vague... It depends what your needs are. But for kol feturez you need to google on your own...
On Linux and Unix systems I use the notify-send OS already implemented system.
import os
os.system('notify-send "'+title+'" "'+message+'")
Maybe in Windows there is some API32 for this.
Check this https://gist.github.com/wontoncc/1808234