Vista - sendkeys, ie7, forms, any new bugs?

An automated data query and download download script that has been
running well for a year suddenly stopped working recently. Due to
(deliberately?)poor coding of the website the only way to fill one
input field is sendkeys:
My routine that matches the element works but now seemingly at random,
it will successfully fill the text input field or leave it blank. Has
the recent XP service pack 3 nerfed sendkeys? Has anyone else
experienced this?

Thanks

hi Brendan, I don't know of any "new bugs", but I am surprised
that your attempt to just fill in the textbox using the document
object model does not work.

As you know already, using sendkeys is always problematical. You
have to wait until the app is ready to receive keystrokes, and
you (sometimes) have to space out the keystrokes to match the
apps capability to receive them.

The "brute force" solution here would be to vary the timings
between appactivate and sending the first keystroke, and also
try sending the keystrokes one-at-a-time, with a short delay
in-between, and also an appactivate in front of each sendkeys.
While this does sound extremely crude, this approach has been
successful for me on occasion.

As far as using the document object model, I suggest you might
go back to that and try different approaches with that too.
In the end, the doc object approach is far superior
to sendkeys.

cheers, jw
____________________________________________________________

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Brendan wrote:

Many -- if not most -- apps will not accept keystrokes into
a textbox, unless the textbox has "focus".

I don't have any first-hand experience with IE7, but you
might experiment (manually) by bringing up the target page,
and hitting the tab key until the focus rectangle lands
on the textbox where you want to enter your keystrokes.

If the focus is not set where you want by the webpage
author, then you can get there by using sendkeys and
sending tab characters.

cheers, jw

On Jun 9, 1:51*pm, mr_unreliable <kindlyReplyToNewsgr...@xxxxxx>
wrote:Thanks for the reply. I would like to have used only the DOM, but the
webpage in question (http://www.nsof.class.noaa.gov/saa/products/
upload) has an <input type="file" field. If there is another way to
assign a file to this field, other than a sloppy SendKeys, I'd like to
know what it is.

Thanks, b

`Brendan wrote:It would have saved quite a bit of time if you had told us that upfront.

Secure coding is equivalent to "poor" coding? MS made a much-needed
change to IE in order to prevent hackers from automatically stealing
personal files from unsuspecting users and you call it "poor" coding ...
Well, the "deliberately" part of your description is certainly correct.
:-)

Since when is a type="file" input used in a download? That type of input
is used for choosing files from a user's machine to be uploaded to a web
server, not downloaded; and quite rightly, scripts have been prevented
from changing the value of those types of inputs.

I suppose it is possible that they noticed the loophole that allowed a
hacker's script to use Sendkeys to fill in a type="file" input and
closed that loophole ... I'm not really sure. I don't have time to go
searching the Microsoft and MSDN sites right now for that information,
but there is no reason you could not attempt such a search yourself :-)
If they did close that loophole, I would expect that they made it harder
to get around it than the solution provided by mr_unreliable suggested.



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On Jun 10, 10:16*am, "Bob Barrows [MVP]" <reb01...@xxxxxx>
wrote:They did close the loophole and they did it by changing the input file
object which I imagine, in the past, you could simply assign a value.
The site in question lets you save and then upload a file with your
search parameters. All I wanted to do was automate the pulling of data
so that our operator would not have to show up hours early to pull it
by hand (large data files). I do not think the site deliberately
wants to prevent automated downloads. They let you manually order as
many as you want and send an email telling you how to download them
using a single ftp command if you do not want to download the files
one at a time from their web interface. Anyhow...