I've got some code that grabs the TaskBar buttons and their text from the windows TaskBar using User32.SendMessage with the TB_GETBUTTON message to retrieve a TBBUTTON structure (Win32 API via C# P/Invokes). But I'm trying to figure out how to then, once I have the handle to the button, grab the associated context menu text. There is some status information on there for a specific application that I would like to retrieve. The button text gets me some of it, but I need to the context menu text to complete it.
Any ideas?
This is not completely clear... Context menus don't have text, as such - they have menu items, each one of which will have text. By "context menu text", do you mean the text of the menu items in the taskbar button's popup/context menu? For example, "Restore", "Minimize" etc in the screenshot below?
If so, I suspect you're going about this the wrong way:
This menu doesn't belong to the button, but is the system menu of the window represented by the taskbar button. If the button has a context menu, this is probably for a grouped collection of windows, not one specific window (or even windows for one process.)
Making judgements based on the context menu of a window sounds like a dodgy approach to me, especially based on text since that will change depending on where in the world your user is located. Applications can also change the contents of this menu so there's no guarantee it will contain something you expect to be there. It would be better to check the window style, if it's minimized, etc, to find out the information that also affects the contents of the menu.
I'm going to answer this based on what your needs seem to be from the question, not what you've directly asked, since (a) it's not possible as asked and (b) I think you're trying to do something else. (As a general guideline, in a question it's good to state why you're trying to do something - and even maybe ask about that, ie 'how do I achieve X' - in case there's a better method than the one you're using. Here, X is probably 'find out information about this window' not 'get the text of the context menu', because that's probably only one possible method to get to X.) Also I think extracting data from the internals of a third-party application like Explorer (the taskbar is an Explorer window) is fragile and prone to break in future versions of Windows.
The system menu or window information (whichever one) belongs to application windows. Unless taskbar buttons are grouped (and then it's the subitems) one taskbar button corresponds to one specific window in the system. So what you want to do is find these windows. You do this by:
Using the EnumWindows function
Then for each window that is passed to the callback, checking the extended window style using GetWindowLong with GWL_EXSTYLE to see if the WS_EX_APPWINDOW bit is set
In addition, sometimes other windows are shown: these heuristics should help.
Each one of these windows is a window that should appear on the taskbar, Alt-Tab dialog, etc.
You say you're getting the text of the taskbar button - this is probably the window caption of the window, and GetWindowText is the canonical (read: probably a lot more reliable) way to get the caption of a window belonging to another process.
If you really want the popup menu, then:
Use GetSystemMenu to retrieve the handle for the system menu for the window. Applications can customise this, so if your app is doing this (and that's why you want the popup menu) ensure you pass false to the bRevert parameter
You can then get the number of menu items using GetMenuItemCount and for each one call GetMenuItemInfo to get info about each menu item. Pass true to the fByPosition parameter to indicate you're accessing the menus by position (since you know the count, you're getting item 0, 1, 2... count-1).
This fills a MENUITEMINFO structure, which (I think, I haven't ever had to code this so I haven't tested) will tell you the text associated with an item via the dwTypeData field "if the MIIM_STRING flag is set in the fMask member".
If you really want information about the window status, you can get this information using methods like IsIconic to see if it's minimized, GetWindowLong again to get other information, etc. I'd suggest you ask another SO question about how to get whatever specific information about a window for details.
Hope that helps!
Related
I'm trying to automate a many clicking process, just to narrow it to the user input.
I encountered problems in controlClicking interface elements, which seems not to be standard Windows GUI elements.
When pointing them with WinSpy they don't appear as separate buttons, but I can point the whole child Window which is drawn in the main program window.
As on pic1, I pointed the whole window and I can find each tab/button by it's text inside and on pic2 I can inspect the ClassNN of that element and it's ID.
As far as clicking other buttons in the main menu bar of the program works, a simple:
ControlClick, ClaTab_01000000H26, WindowName
doesn't work. I think during the day, and many possibilities I tried, I could ControlClick the above button by pointing it with its ID, but that ID changes every instance. I could confirm that tomorrow if it works by ID.
Of course I tried SetControlDelay -1 and ,NN option. But don't take that for granted, I can try any of your suggestions tomorrow.
Both tabs marked with purple color, are to find in the Windows->SiblingWindows tab. I really don't want using x,yCoords (that actually work), but I need the script to be as reliable as possible.
So my questions are:
Am I missing something or you have any suggestions how to click that elements?
Is it correct, that no matter how deep the child windows get (one has buttons to open another on top of it), all the time the WinName stays the same pointing to the main program ***.exe?
Could you provide an example from the web or yours, to find an element's ID by providing the text attached to the button (pic1-red line and also pic2 in "text")?
I also cannot maximize the child window. Double clicking it works, but I can't find the appropriate ClassNN of the window to call.
Could you provide an example, how to use the Messages tab? I assume, if I find the button as on the pictures, I could send a message with controlClick and see if there's a reaction?
1.Ugh. I found the solution, which is awesome, but a little frustrating that with a bit of luck I tried another aproach that's not that logical for a newbie like me:
instead:
ControlClick, ClaTab_01000000H6, ahk_class ClaWin01000000H_2,,,, NA
it's just
ControlFocus, ClaTab_01000000H6, ahk_class ClaWin01000000H_2,,,, NA
2._Yep. One child window creates another and another and another, but winTitle stays the same. In my case:
ahk_class ClaWin01000000H_2
3._Code below returns the handle/ID of the element you specify. Change ClaTab and ClaWin to your chouice.
ControlGet, OutputVar, hwnd,, ClaTab_01000000H1, ahk_class ClaWin01000000H_2
MsgBox, %OutputVar%`
Probably to be continued.
I highly recomend to both use
WinSpy https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=28220
SimpleSpy https://www.the-automator.com/downloads/simple-spy/
First one has lots of useful information and the window tab provides information of hidden buttons/windows. Second one in a more clear way indicates the parent window and its class.
For some fun and self-education, I'm tinkering with writing my own X11 toolkit. Here's something that's stumping me.
I have a traditional combo box display element, a typical combo box with a dropdown popup list, like all popular toolkits have.
For the dropdown popup list, I'm creating a new window, a child of the root window, appropriately positioned below the main combo-box display element.
The dropdown popup list is a window in its own full right, that implements keyboard-based navigation, to select the individual entries in the dropdown list.
So, I'm using SetInputFocus to set the input focus to the popup after it opens.
What I find is that when I do that, the window manager then redraws the frame of the main window to indicate that it no longer has input focus. Which is technically true, but I don't see the same results with the more mainstream toolkits, where, in the comparable situation, the main window's frame shows that it still has input focus.
For the pop-up window, in addition to setting override-redirect, I'm also doing everything I can think of, to tell the window manager what's going on: setting the window group leader ID in the popup window's WM_HINTS, setting WM_TRANSIENT_FOR, and setting _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE to _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_COMBO; none of that seems to work (I verified that the properties are approriately set, via xprop).
It seems like I have to keep the input focus in the combo box window, and forward keypress and keyrelease events to the display elements in the dropdown popup, which feels clunky. Am I overlooking some property that would tell the window manager that the popup's input focus is linked to the main window's (besides the ones that I've mentioned), that would keep the main window's frame drawn to show that it has input focus, when the input focus is actually in the popup?
Most X11 override-redirect exclusive popup windows (menus, combo boxes, ...) grab the keyboard and/or pointer with either passive or active grab.
See XGrabKey, XGrabKeyboard, XGrabButton, XGrabPointer in the X11 programming manual.
Or maybe don't, because the manual is totally unclear about what the heck these functions are and how they can be used. Search the interwebs for usage examples, probably in other widget libraries. Unfortunately I don't know of a simple informative example offhand.
It is not necessary to call XSetInputFocus at all because all keyboard and/or pointer events are reported to the grabbing clients.
To modify a window of another program, I need to find a specific SysTreeView32 in it using EnumChildWindows API call.
When I inspect the window using Spy++, there are a number of SysTreeView32's in it but all are greyed out except one, which is the one I'm looking for.
The following picture is an example of grey items:
Why are the shown items gray and what API call does Spy++ use to know whether it should grey out an item or not?
Those are just non-visible windows - ie HWNDs that don't have the WS_VISIBLE style bit set. They are often worker windows - windows that just exist to process various messages in the background - or in some cases are UI that's yet to become visible. For example, a window that lets you hide or show a toolbar may just hide it by making it invisible rather than destroying it and recreating it later.
In your specific case, the WorkerW could be a placeholder for some other piece of UI that's not needed right now, while the msctl_statusbar32 looks like it's a hidden status bar.
Simple version
Is there any way to maintain focus on menu after clicking a menu command?
Detailed version
Specifically, I've made a menu with some menu item with checked property. The problem is that each time I click checked menu item the menu lose its focus. It can be pretty annoying when there is a number of menu item with checked property and I want to manipulate them at once.
The most elegant solution for the problem would be maintaining focus on menu, but I can't find a way to apply it. Is it possible? And if so, what's the way to do that?
Even if there would a solution for it, sooner or later you will enter a situation in which a numerical or string property is changed via the menu, and then it becomes even impossible to keep the focus on the menu (while the dialog requesting the number or string is on the screen).
The first, simple alternative would be to put the checkable menu items on a toolbar or ribbon (just like Word does with Bold, Italic, Underline, ...). Numerical/string properties can then also be added on the toolbar or ribbon.
A second alternative could be to have a more complete configuration dialog in which the user can change all the configuration items. The configuration dialog can co-exist with the current checkable items, so users simply changing one check and users changing many properties all get a quick way of doing what they want.
You might also pose this question on https://ux.stackexchange.com/ (this sibling site is more oriented towards good user interface practices).
In trying to learn the very fundamentals of menu handling. My test app's menubar has 3 menus -- namely "TestApp", "File" and "Help". I find I can remove these menus entirely, simply by calling say:
NSMenu* rootMenu = [NSApp mainMenu];
[rootMenu removeItemAtIndex:2];
However, I'd only ever want to temporarily disable them (gray them out). Is there an equally simple way to do this, please?
I may be misunderstanding your question, but it seems like you want to be able to gray-out the actual titles of menus that appear with the system's menu bar (Such as graying-out the "File" menu). I'm not sure if it's even possible, but it certainly goes against the Apple Human Interface Guidelines:
A menu’s title is displayed undimmed
even if all of the menu’s commands are
unavailable (dimmed) at the same time.
Users should always be able to view a
menu’s contents, whether or not they
are currently available.
So, the real solution to the problem is to be able to gray-out all of the menu items within a certain menu when your application is in a certain state. To do this, implement the NSUserInterfaceValidations protocol. It only requires implementing the - (BOOL)validateUserInterfaceItem: method. Typically, when implementing this method, you simply check the selector of the user interface item being validated, and return YES if it should be enabled, or NO if it should not (which will gray-out the menu item).