We need to be able to change the default selected print tray of a given printer. Does anyone have VC++/win32 code for doing this?
In case it matters, I believe we have to change the default setting for the printer. Our print jobs are executed by an application other than ours, so we can't make these kinds of changes in the context of a print operation originating from inside our application. Unless there is some way to modify the default print settings in a different application, I think we are stuck changing the user's defaults for the printer, initiating our print job, then setting the defaults back to the original values.
We'd really prefer to have the defaults change for the current user only, and not require any special UAC elevation, etc...
I suspect that it will use something similar to what is shown in this MSDN article, and involve setting fields in the DEVMODE structure (either dmDefaultSource or dmFormName or both).
Any takers? Or does anyone have any gotchas they'd like to share?
EDIT: Here is a link for DEVMODE documentation DEVMODE documentation
EDIT: I should also point out that we are looking for a general solution - not something specific to a particular printer (we deploy in many, many environments)
FYI - the solution we wound up using was to capture the DEVMODE structure. We have a small win32 app that presents the printer settings dialog (via DocumentProperties with fMode set to DM_IN_PROMPT). The resultant DEVMODE is then saved to disk. When we do our printing, we capture the current DEVMODE, set the stored DEVMODE, initiate the print, then restore the original DEVMODE.
This actually works quite well. Occasionally, the print drivers will update and cause the stored DEVMODE to break, but that doesn't happen very often and it's easy enough for users to fix.
As an extra bonus, this approach allows us to capture ALL of the printer settings (not just the output tray) - so we were able to support advanced settings like stapling, collating, etc...
Tip: If you try this, be sure to write to disk as a binary output stream. In my initial evaluation of this approach, I accidentally set the output stream up as a text output stream. Things would work fine for many cases, then suddenly break for some printers (that used high order bytes in their DEVMODE private data). A dumb, but easy, mistake to make - and one that took a very nice solution off the table for awhile.
Setting features like this can be tricky, especially if the driver doesn't follow Microsoft's print guidelines. That being said, we've had some success with System.Drawing.Printing.PrinterSettings. You can set PaperSource but I'm not sure you can set the defaults.
If you haven't seen this example you may want to look further at it. It describes a method to store and reload printer settings. One of my guys pointed it to me:
PrinterSettings - Changing, Storing and Loading Printer Settings
Another method, that could work but might not work for you, is to determine your the handful of setups you need. Install a printer with each of these (ie: Tray 1, Tray 2) setups. Then simply switch the default printer on print. Not what you are looking for but it may help.
What we typically do in these situations is have the 3rd party app write the data to a folder that we are monitoring, we then pick up the file and parse the Postscript or PCL ourselves and change the paper tray and then send onto the destination device. A lot simpler then it may sound.
dmDefaultSource controls the tray. Unfortunately the values you'll want to set this to differs depending on your driver as this is a bin number and not necessarily the same number as the tray# printed on your printer.
The following link provides some VB6 code for gathering information about your printers tray/bin assignments. You can use that information to programatically assign dmDefaultSource to the appropriate bin # for a tray. You basically need to use DeviceCapabilities to return information about your printers and then search for a string (like "Tray 1") to get the associated bin number.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/194789
I had to do something very similar recently on a specific printer driver and it required a vendor specific SDK. The tray doesn't seem to appear in DEVMODE or any of the other PRINTINFO_* structures so I guess I'd drop an email to the printer vendor.
As a last resort, I can think of two possible hacks. One is to automate the driver at GUI level using a scripted tool such as AutoIT. Second is to dump the registry to file, change the driver setting, dump the registry again, and compare the differences (may or may not work).
As far as I know, printers are controlled by the printer driver by sending them SNMP or PJL commands. But not all printers implement completely these sets of commands.
For HP printers I found at: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=bpl07282&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN some PJL commands (there are some related to the tray too).
I'm not sure this help, but take it as a hint for future searches...
Related
I've been trying to search for ways to change the way windows controls look.
For instance change the OpenFileDialog UI at a windows level, or completely turn the file copy/delete/move dialog into something else, like a series of disks or a bucket filling up with liquid.
Looking around i found that i could write a com app that could be used instead of the default windows ones. But i have no idea where or how to start with these, or even how i could see what i would have to implement to achieve this, nor how i would be able to tell windows to use my custom ones instead of the default ones.
Have tried looking in the microsoft documentation, and i'm 99% sure i'm either unable to search for what i need or it's undocumented.
I know there are some apps from Stardock that could do this where i could just make the graphics, but where's the fun in that?
Anybody able to point me in the right direction?
Interested only in being able to achieve this for windows 10.
You could in theory write your own implementations of IFileOpenDialog and IFileSaveDialog and overwrite the Windows registrations in HKCR\CLSID. This might not affect older applications that use the older open/save common dialogs.
There is also CLSID_ProgressDialog and some progress related interfaces you could take over but I don't know if Explorer actually uses these or its own custom version.
This could obviously break your system so you really have to know what you are doing if you go down this path.
While you are developing this you could choose to selectivity inject into a limited set of processes and hook CoCreateInstance instead.
Changes to existing dialogs (adding/moving/hiding controls and images) can be done with Resource Hacker. This was pretty easy in the 90's but it is more problematic these days because some files are protected and Windows updates are more common.
I have been searching everywhere for all the combinations of things that I want to accomplish hoping something would pop but I can't find anything. Additionally, I am not sure if I am "crafting" my query properly enough so I am hoping I can get some assistance on that here.
What I would like to accomplish is this (pseudo logic)
Create a single container file, for example: vdata.x which will contain everything in it as a single data file
Mount this file as an actual drive/folder in Windows so that you can write to, read from, delete/modify the content as if you were using Windows Explorer. Visible to FS, applications, system/commandline like any other "real" folder on the machine.
Prefer the ability to have this file reside on a thumbdrive and have it mounted either automatically or manually after plugged in and have it show up not as the thumbdrive but as the file inside it, or mount both doesn't matter.
Additionally the ability for that file to be locked, encrypted and accessible (despite auto mounting, if that's the case) after it have been authenticated with a password, random token or whatnot.
Finally a housekeeping element, such as being aware of its available "host" space (aka the thumbdrive) so that as it reaches a certain threshold of expansion, it says, hey move me to a larger device, make room or stop adding more, something akin to, running out of space warning.
I thought about putting this in software recommendation SE but that is not fully up and running yet (at last check) and plus the range of who access that sub-se might very limited, so I am asking here to get feedback and discussion to see if we can answer it better here or it needs to move to there.
Thank you in advance and hope to get some brilliant minds out there to help me accomplish this.
PS. I am not averse to building something like this myself but I am limited in time and health and plus if its already done, why reinvent the wheel right? But if anything could help launch the development of such a tool, I would take that input as well, thank you.
Ok i wrote and application that use Adobe ActiveX control for displaying PDF files.
Adobe ActiveX control load files only from file system. So i nead to feed a file path to this control.
Problem is that i don't want to store PDF files on file system. Event temporary! I wan't to store my PDF files only in memory, and i want to use Adobe ActiveX control.
So i nead:
1) A way to fake file on a file system. So this control would "think" that there is a file, but would load it from memory
2) A way to create file on file system that would be "visible" to only one application, so my PDF control could load it, and other users won't even see it..
3) Something else
PS: I'm not asking to "finish my home work", i'm just asking - is there a way to do this?
You can almost do it (means: no you can't, but you can do something that comes close).
Creating a file with FILE_ATTRIBUTE_TEMPORARY does in principle create a file, temporarily. However, as long as there is sufficient buffer cache (which is normally always the case unless your file is tens to hundreds of megabytes), the system will not write to disk. This is not just something that happens accidentially, but the actual specified behaviour of this flag.
Further, specifying 0 as share mode and FILE_FLAG_DELETE_ON_CLOSE will prevent any other process from opening your file for as long as you keep it open, even if someone knows it's there, and the file will "disappear" when you close it. Even if your application crashes, the OS will clean up behind you (if DRM is the reason). If you're in super paranoia mode and worried about the system bluescreening while your file exists, you can additionally schedule a pending move too. This will, in case of a system crash, remove the file during boot.
Lastly, given NTFS, you can create an alternate stream with a random, preferrably unique name (e.g. SHA1 of the document or a UUID) on any file or even directory. Alternate streams on directories are ... a kind of nasty hack, but entirely legal and they work just fine, and don't appear in Explorer. This will not really make your file invisible, but nearly so (in almost every practical aspect, anyway). If you're a good citizen, you will want to use the system temp folder for such a thing, not the program folder or some other place that you shouldn't write to.
Creating an alternate stream is dead easy too, just use the normal file or directory name and append a colon (:) and the name of the stream you want. No extra API needed.
Other than that, it gets kind of hard. You can of course always create something like a ramdisk (would be tough to hide it, though), or try to use one of the stream-from-memory functions to fool an application into reading from a memory buffer on the allegation of a file... but that's not trivial stuff.
If something needs to be on a file system to pass to another application, you can not hide it/limit it to certain processes. Anything your app can see, anything else at the same privilige level can also see/access. You may be able to lock it but how depends on why you want to protect against.
Remember that the user's PC is theirs, not yours so they have full access to everything on it.
You can create a virtual disk and limit access to it to only specific application. Do to this you would have to write a file system driver or a filesystem filter driver. Both work in kernel mode and are tricky to write and maintain. Our company offers components that let you avoid writing drivers yourself and write business logic in user-mode (we provide drivers in those products).
Your most obvious option is to get rid of Adobe Reader control and use some third-party component that displays PDFs and can load them from memory.
But in general a smart hacker would be able to capture your data unless you have (a) non-standard data format, and/or (b) stream the data from the server dynamically, not keeping the complete data on the computer. These are not bulletproof solutions either, but they make hacker's work much harder.
I'm looking to create a print driver that will monitor jobs sent to a particular printer and add in a small amount of text to each page. I have downloaded the WDK and have the bitmap example working, but the monitor examples are complicated. The WDK documentation seems to be lacking any explanation of the samples. I also don't see any Visual Studio templates for Windows Drivers (not sure if they are supposed to be installed as part of the WDK or not).
I think what I'm struggling the most with is seeing the overall approach. Since this is printing to a printer (not file), I'm assuming I still need to use the printer's driver somehow. So does that make what I'm trying to do a "Filter Driver"? As you can tell, this is not something I've done before, so any help or direction would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Ryan
What exactly do you need to add in? You can use the Mini Driver in the WinDDK and just hijack one of the commands.
If you need to add in something more you'll probably want a port monitor like Redmon (or we are about to release one) that can take your job and route it to some application that modifies the data and then routes to the final printer.
If you just need to insert some items at the very start (inject some PCL or something) then you can use the Windows separator page and insert the data at the start of the stream.
If you give some more detail about what exactly you need to modify or insert I can probably help a little more.
I have an application, which displays me some data. I need to attach to this app's process, find the data I need in memory (one single number, actually), and save it somewhere. This application doesn't seem to use standard windows controls, so things aren't going to be as simple as reading controls data using AutoIt or something similar.
Currently I'm a self-learner database guy and have quite shallow knowledge about windows apps debugging. Not even sure if I asked my question correctly enough.
So, can you give me some starter guidelines about, say, what should I read first, and general directions I should work on?
Thanks.
To read memory of other application you need to open the process with respect of OpenProcess with at least PROCESS_VM_READ access rights and then use ReadProcessMemory to read any memory address from the process. If you are an administrator or have debug privilege you will be able to open any process with maximal access rights, you need only to enable SeDebugPrivilege before (see for example http://support.microsoft.com/kb/131065).
If you don't know a much about the memory of the destination process you can just enumerate the memory blocks with respect of VirtualQueryEx (see How does one use VirtualAllocEx do make room for a code cave? as an example where I examine the program code. The program data you can examine in the same way).
The most practical problem which I see is that you ask your question in too general way. If you explain more what kind of the data you are looking for I could probably suggest you a better way. For example if you could see the data somewhere you could examine the corresponding windows and controls with respect of Spy++ (a part of Visual Studio Tools). The most important are the class of windows (or controls) and the messages which will be send at the moment when the most interesting window are displayed. You can also use Process Monitor to trace all file and registry access at the time when the windows with the interesting information will be displayed. At least at the beginning you should examine the memory of the process with ReadProcessMemory at the moment when the data which you are looking for are displayed on the window.
If you will have no success in your investigations I'd recommend you to insert in your question more information.
My primary advice is: try to find any other method of integration than this. Even if you succeed, you'll be hostage to any kinds of changes in the target process, and possibly in the Windows O/S. What you are describing is behaviour most virus scanners should flag and hinder: if not now, then in the future.
That said, you can take a look at DLL injection. However, it sounds as if you're going to have to debug the heck out of the target process at the disassembly level: otherwise, how are you going to know what memory address to read?
I used to know the windows debugging API but it's long lost memory. How about using ollydbg:
http://www.ollydbg.de/
And controlling that with both ollydbg script and autoit?
Sounds interesting... but very difficult. Since you say this is a 'one-off', what about something like this instead?
Take a screenshot of this application.
Run the screenshot through an OCR program
If you are able to read the text you are looking for in a predictable way, you're halfway there!
So now if you can read a OCR'd screenshot of your application, it is a simple matter of writing a program that does the following:
Scripts the steps to get the data on the screen
Creates a screenshot of the data in question
Runs it through an OCR program like Microsoft Office Document Imaging
Extracts the relevant text and does 'whatever' with it.
I have done something like this before with pretty good results, but I would say it is a fragile solution. If the application changes, it stops working. If the OCR can't read the text, it stops working. If the OCR reads the wrong text, it might do worse things than stop working...
As the other posters have said, reaching into memory and pulling out data is a pretty advanced topic... kudos to you if you can figure out a way to do that!
I know this may not be a popular answer, due to the nature of what this software is used for, but programs like CheatEngine and ArtMoney allow you to search through all the memory reserved by a process for a given value, then refine the results till you find the address of the value you're looking for.
I learned this initially while trying to learn how to better protect my games after coming across a trainer for one of them, but have found the technique occasionally useful when debugging.
Here is an example of the technique described above in use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv04gYx2jMw&t=265