Windows Balloon-tooltips in Python - python

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

Related

WxPython Choice Field Invisible just on Mac

I am developing a cross platform app in Python using wxPython. The app is fully developed, and the graphics toolkit is set in stone, at least for the time being.
On Windows, everything looks great. On Linux, everything looks pretty good. On Mac, I am having trouble with a combobox/choice being hidden in the toolbar, even though it shows up fine on Windows.
Here is a snapshot of my app on Linux, noting the entire "CoeffConv ..." section is part of the perfectly displayed combobox:
And here is a snapshot of the same exact codebase on Mac:
I've tried with wx.ComboBox and wx.Choice with the same effect. I've made sure to call Realize() after I've added my toolbar items. I've made sure AddControl is called to actually add the object to the toolbar. It's definitely trying to render because the spacing is exactly what I would expect, given the contents of the choice field.
In fact, if I don't call AddControl, but I create the choice field with the toolbar as the parent, the box gets rendered but things aren't arranged properly due to the missing AddControl call:
As another check, I created a super simple toolbar with choice demo, and it works just fine:
So, here's the summary of things I know:
On Windows, the choice field works perfect, indicating the code isn't necessarily wrong.
On Linux, the choice field works perfect, supporting the idea that the code is actually OK.
On Mac, the choice field is present it seems, but somehow invisible, implying this is a problem with the Mac, or the Python distribution on Mac, or the combobox control in the wxPython distribution on Mac.
On Mac, I can get the choice to render (improperly but still) without an AddControl call, indicating the combobox can render properly, but something is goofy about the placement when added to the toolbar
However, On Mac, I can get a toolbar/choice to render totally fine in a dummy example, indicating it's something about my implementation...but I can't figure out what would cause it as I'm trying to make the exact same calls to the wx objects as in the dummy example.
I can't get the dummy example to reproduce the problem, but I'll keep trying. I'm happy to report out some object properties if they would be helpful in diagnosing. If someone has a clue for what could cause it to not show up, I'd really appreciate it!
While I couldn't find the root as to why it didn't work on Mac, I did find an issue that could help others.
First a little more background. In the app, we have multiple toolbars. Because of that, we are creating toolbars using plain wx.ToolBar objects and adding them to the app frame using sizers. This is in contrast to the more standard method of using self.CreateToolBar() which only allows a frame to have a single toolbar.
When I make a single change to the code to use the more natural CreateToolBar interface, the combobox immediately shows up. When I do that, the second toolbar is messed up, but at least the initial toolbar works perfectly. I'll be investigating how to get multiple toolbars on Mac, but it's a step in the right direction.
It's been a while, but there's another solution to this for wxPython 4 if you can't use CreateToolBar():
The widgets do get added to the bar and reserve the correct amount of space, but they fail to draw properly. You can resolve this by calling control.Hide() followed by control.Show() on each widget control, which then makes them draw properly.

Switching Windows with Python

I'll preface this by saying that I'm very inexperienced with python, and I'm hoping that means the solution to my problem will be simple.
My program will be performing simple actions in another window, so ideally I would like my script to make sure that this other window is maximized and active before it proceeds with the rest of the commands. This has proved to be much more difficult than I had expected.
I am fairly certain that I can achieve this with win32gui using find_window and setting it to the foreground. I thought I had found my solution when I came across this previous question:
Python Window Activation
Unfortunately I was unable to use the solution code or manipulate it to solve my problem for a few reasons:
-The way that user had defined find_window only allows you to choose by the classname of the window, which I don't know and haven't been able to find since it is just a game running in Java. I couldn't seem to change that line to work for the specific windowname (Which I do know) as it is not the "default argument".
-I don't want to enumerate the windows to find it as I'm not sure how that would work.
-using find_window_wildcard as it's written in that script has managed to bring the window to the foreground a few times, but only if the window was already open, and it only works intermittently.
-set_foreground() requires one input statement and no matter how I try to set it I am always given an error that I either have the wrong number of elements or an invalid handle on the window.
I know that I'm stupid; but a clear and concise solution to this problem or at least a good explanation of the find_window/getwindow syntax would be a godsend to myself and anyone else who's having this problem.
I would strongly suggest you take a look at the pages for Swapy and for pywinauto. They can help you do some awesome things when it comes to UI Automation.
The way that user had defined find_window only allows you to choose by the classname of the window
The way the user defined it is to pass the two parameters class_name and window_name through, untouched, to win32gui.FindWindow (which in turn just calls the Win32 API function FindWindow). So, just do this:
windowmgr.find_window(None, 'My Window Name')
But even if that weren't true, you don't need to use his find_window function; it should be pretty obvious how to call win32gui.FindWindow yourself:
hwnd = win32gui.FindWindow(None, 'My Window Name')
And if you want a good explanation of the FindWindow/EnumWindows/etc. syntax, did you try looking at the docs for them? Is there something you didn't understand there?
Meanwhile:
… the classname of the window, which I don't know and haven't been able to find since it is just a game running in Java
What difference does it make that it's running in Java? You can enumerate the windows and print out their classnames, whether they're written in C++, Java, .NET, Python, or anything else. Or use one of the tools that comes with Visual Studio/VS Express, or any of the free improved versions you can find all over the net, like MS Spy++, which will let you point at a window and give you the caption and class name.
I don't want to enumerate the windows to find it as I'm not sure how that would work.
Just call windowmgr.find_window_wildcard(wildcard) with a regular expression, and it'll enumerate the windows and compare their titles to that regular expression.
If you want to write your own code to do it, just write a function like this:
def my_callback(hwnd, cookie):
Now, when you do this:
win32gui.EnumWindows(my_callback, some_cookie)
… it will call your my_callback function once per window, with hwnd being the window (which you can pass to win32gui functions like, e.g., GetWindowText), and cookie being the same some_cookie value you passed in. (If you don't need anything passed in, just pass None, and don't do anything with the value in your callback function. But you can see how the other answerer used it to pass the regular expression through.)
Meanwhile:
using find_window_wildcard as it's written in that script has managed to bring the window to the foreground a few times, but only if the window was already open, and it only works intermittently.
First, you can't bring a window to the foreground if it doesn't exist. How do you expect that to work?
As far as working intermittently, my guess is that there are lots of windows that match your wildcard, and the program is going to just pick one of them arbitrarily. It may not be the one you want. (It may even be a hidden window or something, so you won't see anything happen at all.)
At any rate, you don't need to use find_window_wildcard; if you know the exact name, use that. Of course it still may not be unique (whatever the game's name is, there's nothing stopping you from opening an email message or a Notepad window with the same title… which, by the way, is why you want to try class names first), but at least it's more likely to be unique than some underspecified wildcard.
So, what if the class name isn't unique (or, even worse, it's one of the special "number" classes, like #32770 for a general dialog window), and neither is the window name? You may be able to narrow things down a little better by looking at, say, the owning process or module (exe/dll), or the parent window, or whatever. You'll have to look through the win32gui and/or MSDN docs (linked above) for likely things to try, and play around through trial and error (remember the Spy tool, too) until you find some way to specify the window uniquely. Then code that up.

Take all input in Python (like UAC)

Is there any way I can create a UAC-like environment in Python? I want to basically lock the workstation without actually using the Windows lock screen. The user should not be able to do anything except, say, type a password to unlock the workstation.
You cannot do this without cooperation with operating system. Whatever you do, Ctrl-Alt-Del will allow the user to circumvent your lock.
The API call you're looking for Win32-wise is a combination of CreateDesktop and SetThreadDesktop.
In terms of the internals of Vista+ desktops, MSDN covers this, as does this blog post. This'll give you the requisite background to know what you're doing.
In terms of making it look like the UAC dialog - well, consent.exe actually takes a screenshot of the desktop and copies it to the background of the new desktop; otherwise, the desktop will be empty.
As the other answerer has pointed out - Ctrl+Alt+Delete will still work. There's no way around that - at least, not without replacing the keyboard driver, anyway.
As to how to do this in Python - it looks like pywin32 implements SetThreadDesktop etc. I'm not sure how compatible it is with Win32; if you find it doesn't work as you need, then you might need a python extension to do it. They're not nearly as hard to write as they sound.
You might be able to get the effect you desire using a GUI toolkit that draws a window that covers the entire screen, then do a global grab of the keyboard events. I'm not sure if it will catch something like ctrl-alt-del on windows, however.
For example, with Tkinter you can create a main window, then call the overrideredirect method to turn off all window decorations (the standard window titlebar and window borders, assuming your window manager has such things). You can query the size of the monitor, then set this window to that size. I'm not sure if this will let you overlay the OSX menubar, though. Finally, you can do a grab which will force all input to a specific window.
How effective this is depends on just how "locked out" you want the user to be. On a *nix/X11 system you can pretty much completely lock them out (so make sure you can remotely log in while testing, or you may have to forcibly reboot if your code has a bug). On windows or OSX the effectiveness might be a little less.
I would try with pygame, because it can lock mouse to itself and thus keep all input to itself, but i wouldn't call this secure without much testing, ctr-alt-del probably escape it, can't try on windows right now.
(not very different of Bryan Oakley's answer, except with pygame)

Formatting Python string output

I'm writing a calculator currently and I'd like to have results displayed in a visually appealing form. The program just has a command line interface for the moment, but I've been trying to find a way to do various things with the results it displays. For example, I'd like to have it display the result in a bigger font size, a different font than system default, and even subscripts and superscripts. From what I could find, the best way to do such things would be if I introduced a GUI and used something like wxPython, and using Unicode code points can only resolve part of the issue. Moreover, for various reasons, I'd just like to have the program in command line for the moment.
I don't think you can accomplish this with the command line, but you might check out curses. I would suggest picking up a GUI for this sort of thing. It's really not too hard to learn and Python's builtin Tkinter is perfectly functional for getting started. There are many good resources for Tkinter. Here are a few I like:
effbot.org
Thinking in Tkinter
An Introduction to Tkinter
WxPython is excellent, but if you are just getting started my suggestion would be to start with Tkinter. Others might disagree...
EDIT
I just remembered running across the console module for Windows. I suspect it won't won't get you what you want, but at least it's out there.
If you're running this on the command line, I'm almost certain that there's nothing you can do to override the font preferences set by the user. In both windows and Linux, the font settings of the command line are user controlled, and I doubt that you can change it without sudo access. Seeing as you're writing a calculator, I don't think a user would want to run it as sudo - I certainly wouldn't want to run something as simple as a calculator with sudo privileges. To require that would make the user think that you are up to something malicious

How to make PowerBuilder UI testing application?

I'm not familiar with PowerBuilder but I have a task to create Automatic UI Test Application for PB. We've decided to do it in Python with pywinauto and iaccesible libraries. The problem is that some UI elements like newly added lists record can not be accesed from it (even inspect32 can't get it).
Any ideas how to reach this elements and make them testable?
I'm experimenting with code for a tool for automating PowerBuilder-based GUIs as well. From what I can see, your best bet would be to use the PowerBuilder Native Interface (PBNI), and call PowerScript code from within your NVO.
If you like, feel free to send me an email (see my profile for my email address), I'd be interested in exchanging ideas about how to do this.
I didn't use PowerBuilder for a while but I guess that the problem that you are trying to solve is similar to the one I am trying to address for people making projects with SCADA systems like Wonderware Intouch.
The problem with such an application is that there is no API to get or set the value of a control. So a pywinauto approach can't work.
I've made a small tool to simulate the user events and to get the results from a screencapture. I am usig PIL and pytesser ORM for the analysis of the screen captures. It is not the easiest way but it works OK.
The tool is open-source and free of charge and can be downloaded from my website (Sorry in french). You just need an account but it's free as well. Just ask.
If you can read french, here is one article about testing Intouch-based applications
Sorry for the self promotion, but I was facing a similar problem with no solution so I've written my own. Anyway, that's free and open-source...
I've seen in AutomatedQa support that they a recipe recommending using msaa and setting some properties on the controls. I do not know if it works.
If you are testing DataWindows (the class is pbdwxxx, e.g. pbdw110) you will have to use a combination of clicking at specific coordinates and sending Tab keys to get to the control you want. Of course you can also send up and down arrow keys to move among rows. The easiest thing to do is to start with a normal control like an SLE and tab into the DataWindow. The problem is that the DataWindow is essentially just an image. There is no control for a given field until you move the focus there by clicking or tabbing. I've also found that the DataWindow's iAccessible interface is a bit strange. If you ask the DataWindow for the object with focus, you don't get the right answer. If you enumerate through all of the children you can find the one that has focus. If you can modify the source I also advise that you set AccessibleName for your DataWindow controls, otherwise you probably won't be able to identify the controls except by position (by DataWindow controls I mean the ones inside the DataWindow, not the DataWindow itself). If it's an MDI application, you may also find it useful to locate the MicroHelp window (class fnhelpxxx, e.g. fnhelp110, find from the main application window) to help determine your current context.
Edited to add:
Sikuli looks very promising for testing PowerBuilder. It works by recognizing objects on the screen from a saved fragment of screenshot. That is, you take a screenshot of the part of the screen you want it to find.

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