Best Practices, Various Methods to Click GUI Controls - PDF Document Navigation

[etidd]

junkew,

Pardon me if I have made you repeat certain points you've already covered in your FAQ section. I'm doing my best to keep up.

Although, I have another canned FAQ to ask before I can even address troubleshooting this example you carefully put together.

I looked through the Includes folder several times and cannot find these files: UIA_Functions.au3, UIA_SafeArray.au3, and UIA_Variant.au3. None of these files are in the folder called "GuiIncludes" in the UIASpy.7z archive as it states in the code comments. Obviously, the compiler throws an error about missing files and doesn't execute the example code above. I'm browsing the linked threads above and am still looking for a download that contains these file dependencies. I have UIAWrappers.au3.

Next, you wrote this about Winamp's tree of controls:

On 2/5/2024 at 6:25 PM, junkew said:

The tree of WinAmp is not nicely behaving (as its hard to get with tools like inspect.exe) with UIASpy you can get tot your controls by using keys F1-F4 when you hover over certain elements and 90% can be recognized and you can generate parts of the code with UIASpy

In Winamp, I pressed F1 through F4 while the mouse was hovering over the maximize / restore button (since that is the desired control to be targeted for a mouse click) with UIA Spy simultaneously running. In UIA Spy, Winamp does indeed have very few recognized controls (2 panes). A third pane appears called "BaseWindow_RootWnd" after I press F4, but there are no relevant controls in that pane. It is empty. After pressing F4 over the file pane, UIA Spy did uncover a ton of elements; however, none of them were the maximize button. Here is what I'm seeing below:

The main pane is the 2nd one. "WinampVis" is almost certainly the Winamp Visualization tab that can be clicked from within the main window.

So, I don't know how to reproduce your method of pressing F1-F4 to expose the title bar controls for Winamp. This seems more difficult to do Winamp first whereas the tabs in Nitro PDF are discovered by UIA Spy without any keyboard trick. I haven't gotten to the point of running the example code you wrote to examine why it's not actually performing the click.

My solution using WinGetPos() works as long as the non-maximized window is within the viewport. If the window is dragged off the screen to the right, it will not work. I was brainstorming a solution to perform a mouse click and drag on the title bar and position the window in the middle of the screen and then do the click on the maximize button.

I also should find out how to determine whether an application is 32 or 64 bits.

I'm going to study the examples to grow my understanding while I work toward solving challenging cases like Winamp.

 

Edited February 10 by etidd

[etidd]

16 hours ago, etidd said:

I looked through the Includes folder several times and cannot find these files: UIA_Functions.au3, UIA_SafeArray.au3, and UIA_Variant.au3. None of these files are in the folder called "GuiIncludes" in the UIASpy.7z archive as it states in the code comments.

Oops, I found all relevant files in the other thread called "UI Automation UDF's". Sorry about that.

Now, the example code has been put into a script that I temporarily named UIAExample.au3 which just runs and performs nothing - no clicks to the maximize button in Winamp.

Occasionally, I can see additional elements in UIA Spy after pressing F3 over the maximize button, but most of the time, I get nothing and have no idea what that control is called or what its ID number is. This must be the problem. Maybe I can do a ConsoleRead() to get the data output from the example code as that might provide insight into what the issue is. I'm starting to doubt that UIA objects will work for Winamp.

I should follow up this post with an example code for Nitro PDF which has clearly identified UIA elements. I'll try my best. Maybe I'll even get it right!

Thanks very much. -ty

Edited February 11 by etidd