Vista - retrieve data from an applications popup window

Can anyone tell me how to retrieve the strMsg or strTitle from another
running applications popup window?
I need help please.

> Can anyone tell me how to retrieve the strMsg or strTitle from anotherThat's a tough one. You might try the WMI Win32_Process
class. I think that can return the window caption, but it
may not give you a window that's not top-level.

Other than that, even with Win32 API it's diffficult. There
are functions to get top level windows, and functions to
enumerate child windows, and functions to get the title bar
caption or "text" of any window. (Text depends on the window.)
And there are Active Accessibility functions that can go down
into any and all windows, returning a number of properties
from all sub-windows. But there's nothing like that in script, and
even with the API it's tedious and limited.

The only thing I can think of, which would be a long shot,
would be to take a screenshot via script and then write your
own script-based OCR functionality to decipher the characters
displayed onscreen.

Mark.Luebke@xxxxxx wrote:hi Mark,

Yes, that sort of stuff is not within the usual scope of script.

You can struggle with the system api, but if you are willing to
use a third-party control, then I would suggest "AutoItX". It is
an actX control, callable from script, which will do what you
want. It is part of the AutoIt language download, available here:

http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/downloads.shtml

Note: if you happen to use win9x, the current version of autoit
won't work for you, you will have to go back to version 3.2.10.

There are other third-party controls which will work. If you
do wish to call system api's from script, then "dynawrap" will
do it for you (see boilerplate below).

cheers, jw
____________________________________________________________

You got questions? WE GOT ANSWERS!!! ..(but, no guarantee
the answers will be applicable to the questions)


--- <DynaWrap Boilerplate> ---
It is possible to declare-and-call an api from script,
but you must use a third-party control to do so,
or else write one yourself.

It has already been correctly pointed out that there
is no api-capability in "pure" script.

If you are willing to use a third-party control, then
one such control, called "DynaWrap", can be found on
Guenter Born's website (note: Guenter refers to it as
"DynaCall"). Here is the link to it:

http://people.freenet.de/gborn/WSHBa...SHDynaCall.htm

- or -

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...SHDynaCall.htm

On that page you will find a download for the control,
plus some code samples.

Note: you may find additional sample code by searching
the archives of the wsh and vbscript ng's.

Note also: DynaWrap does have its limitations. There are
certain things it can't do. For example, you can't call
api's "by ordinal". (I had previously asserted that you
can't use DynaWrap to call api's which take typedefs as
parameters, but I have been proven wrong on that --
although it took me about two weeks to figure out how it
was done). Regardless, Dynawrap will work for most of
"the usual suspects".

And finally, DynaWrap doesn't work entirely as advertised.
For example, it is supposed to allow for the declaration of
several api definitions in one instance of itself. I could
never get that to work (in win9x -- but others have shown
this to work as advertised under winNT). With win98, you
will need a new instance of DynaWrap for every api, or else
re-instantiate the object for every api. Someday I'm going
to learn enough c++ to fix that...

Another possibility (for calling api's from script is XNeat:

http://www.xneat.com/doc/call_win32_api.html

One other thing. While the above discussion is oriented to
calling the system api's, contained in the user32, kernel32,
gdi32 and other system dll's, you could use DynaWrap (and
other similiar utilities) to call the exported interfaces
to ANY dll.

--- </DynaWrap Boilerplate> ---

You might try AutoITx from http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/index.shtml

<Mark.Luebke@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:a69f0c88-8f97-4f7a-88da-b4302be48f9b@xxxxxx