Are there any tutorials or guides out there that anyone knows of that will show me how to read forms from an external program and get back information about the controls on the form? Currently, I can get the handle to the form, and I can get the class name, but I need to get more information such as a persistent name and contained data. Thanks.
Edit:
I now have a way to read the contained data (with the WM_GETTEXT message), however, I still need a persistent name/ID that I can be sure will not change from instance to instance. One way I can think of for doing this is to take the handle, find the position of the control on the window, and then get the handle from the position from then on. Another way is to determine a static ID for the control and then use that to get the handle from then on. The new scope of my problem is how to implement either of these. Any Ideas?
I would look at UI Automation; in particular, the RuntimeID property, the NativeWindowHandle property, and the Name property.
Related
Further to a post (CefSharp load a page with browser login).
I implemented the IRequestHandler interface and the different methods, particularly the GetAuthCredentials where I show a dialog and recover user and password and passing it to the event handler.
Now I want to access to the dom where I get several frameset with differents frames and I'm interested in one frame which I know the name Atribute.
Inside this frame I need to get list of different type of input , select etc...
In my app I have a button which I use to set values of the different elements depending if they are present on the displayed page.
PROBLEM is I don't see any way of getting the document, the frames collection etc....
CefSharp doesn't expose the underlying DOM, and is unlikely to see http://magpcss.org/ceforum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=10652&p=19533#p16750
Your best bet is to use EvaluateScriptAsync and a combination of Javascript Binding
https://github.com/cefsharp/CefSharp/wiki/Frequently-asked-questions#2-how-do-you-call-a-javascript-method-that-return-a-result
https://github.com/cefsharp/CefSharp/wiki/Frequently-asked-questions#3-how-do-you-expose-a-net-class-to-javascript
If you absolutely must have DOM access and cannot invent your way to a solution then CefGlue might be a better choice for you. (I should point out that the DOM can only be accesses in the Render process, and as such calls needed to be passed to the Browser process though IPC, so it isn't a trivial task).
I am writing a program that overlay's a toolbar onto another applications window. I am able to iterate through the MDI child windows and even access all the controls via PInvoke. The one thing I am trying to figure out is how to get the controls actual Name property.
I am able to see the name of the field using Hawkeye but I cannot figure out how it is getting the control name.
One thought is that it may be injecting something into the target application and running something like Control.FromHandle but I am not 100% sure.
Thanks for any help.
Unfortunately, the Name property of a control is a property of the .Net object that creates the window not of the control window itself. There is no way to get this value using the window handle - PInvoke or otherwise - from outside of the process.
You would need to do some variation on what Hawkeye appears to do. Attach to the process, examine the object hierarchy and/or inject code dynamically using the CLR Debugging API.
I often have the situation that I need to pass a linq2sql object from one WPF window to another one.
For example I have a window with a list of linq2SQL objects. The list is bound from a public declared DataContext in the "Window_Loaded"-event. With a double click on one of these items a second window opens and the object can be edited. While opening the selected object is passed to a property of the second window. After the user has made some changes he decides to discard the changes and closes the second window.
Now because the input fields are bound directly to the Linq2SQL object the changed values are still present.
What is the best practice in this situation? Is it better to pass a newly created object from a new created DataContext to the second window? Then I have to somehow refresh the list on the first window when the changes are wanted.
Or can I use the already bound object from the list of objects from the first window and pass it directly to the second window?
I know that I can refresh the object when I have to reload the object
DB.Refresh(System.Data.Linq.RefreshMode.OverwriteCurrentValues, MyObject);
What is the best practice?
The question is more general and touches the important issue: what lifetime policy best suits the linq2sql datacontext in different types of applications.
In case of a web application, this question has a simple answer: the "per-httprequest" lifetime policy is the most convenient.
In your case, a WPF application, there are two approaches I am aware of:
in a "per-the-lifetime-of-the-application" policy you would create a single data context for the lifetime of your application. Although technically this works, there are potential issues with the memory consumption - as the application retrieves more and more data, the first level cache in the data context grows without control and could possibly just run out of resources at some point
in a "per-presenter (view)" policy you create a new data context in each of your presenter (view model) (or view, if you don't follow mvvm) which means that two different views do not share the same context. I'd say this is recommended approach, there are no risks of unwanted resource issues, however, you need an additional mechanism to pass events between views so that views could be refreshed when the data changes.
Note, that all your business logic should be unaware of the actual policy. To do so, let your data context be injected (by constructor for example) to any class that uses it. Depending on the actual policy, a proper context is injected into a business class. This way, you could even change the lifetime management policy someday with no need to refactor your business code.
Im looking forward to writing a combobox with history. Much like address bar, only simpler(no searching, use history only). Since this is quite common, i think maybe there is a library or anything on it. I dont want to write the system from scratch(which ive been doing anyway until i realize its too much work for simple unrequired feature).
So, my question is, how can i have a combobox that can save information that user entered, manage the information that the user entered(delete, rank up/down etc).
Thanks.
i think one solution could be to define an object with hold the entered information and other information like delete command, rank value. then put this object in a observablecollection, use it as the combobox itemsource and whenever a user put something in your comboxbox update your collection in the way you want.
I see a 'Tag' property in the design view for most WinForms controls. I have never used this tag and want to know why I would want to use it.
It allows you to store some of your own data with a control. It mostly useful in tree controls where you might want each node/leaf to have some extra data associated with it. This way when you click on a node you can perform an action relevant to the node.
Its a general "catch-all" for additional data you wish to store with a control.
I too have never used it.
We perform heavy use of tags. We have some methods for checking input, and these methods checks whats in the tags in order to know what control to perform.
IE: if a textbox has RQ=1;DT=int;MAX=100
the automatic method knows that this text can not be left blank, that should accept only integers within 0 and 100.
We have a complete pseudo declarative language for this.
Kind of useful!
More specific for your question, Tags are for your use.
for example you have a lot of buttons with single method handling clicks. then at handler you have do differentiate them from each other. So you put some sort of id (or reference) and then access it there.