I'm currently working on a legacy MFC application undergoing a major upgrade. One of the things we're changing is how we test this. We want to create GUI automation tests for the application, and to that end, we're using UI spy to inspect the visual elements, pull out automation names and IDs and help us write our tests. However, unfortunately, a lot of elements (ie tree items, text boxes) don't have automation names associated with them, and we'd like to add them. From what I've been able to find by googling around, overriding CWnd::get_accName should allow us to associate accessibility API names with the elements, but when I override it, nothing changes and I can't see the newly assigned name. Have I missed something ? Can somebody please point me in the right direction for adding accessibility information to an MFC application ?
Ensure you are calling EnableActiveAccessibility() in the CWnd-derived class constructor.
Related
In our company we use a native win32 UI framework written in C++. There are several controlls where Ranorex Spy doesn't "see" any useful information for identification or verification.
Is there some API in Ranorex that can be used to make it compatible with such a framework?
Changing the framework to make it more Ranorex-friendly is not going to happen (company politics).
I've had a similar issue where the application I'm testing has a list box, with items in it, however Ranorex was not picking up anything beyond the list box. In fact, it actually recognized it as a plain 'Element', rather than a list box.
To fix, try this...
Right click the object (in my case it was the Element)and click "Add process name to GDI capture list".
In my case, it added a bunch of text objects under the Element, which enabled me to actually "See" the info I needed.
I have experience building GUIs in Java, C#, and C++ using the WinAPI. I'm attempting my first GUI in C++ using Qt and I have a bit of a transition problem. In any of the other three GUI paradigms, I could create my own GUI components, extend existing JPanels, etc. and end up with a custom-made GUI element that I could add to other GUI windows. C# is particularly good at this as anything I create automatically shows up in the Toolbox after it compiles.
From what I can see there are only two options in Qt and I'm hoping there is something I'm missing. The options are:
Create a custom Widget which may then be imported using a widget container promoted to the right widget.
Build what I like and drag it to scratchpad, from where I can replicate it to my heart's content.
The problem is that I want dynamically add/remove GUI elements at run time. For example, I have a Model-View-Control pattern. The view and control are two different panels in the GUI. When I switch to a different view in one panel, I want to remove the control from the other panel and replace it with the right control for the new view.
From what I can tell, I could do this using custom widgets, but it seems extremely heavy handed to do this for tons of minor widgets in composition to a greater capability. And although I can do the kind of composition I want in scratchpad, I can't figure out how to dynamically add something I have saved in scratchpad.
It is also possible that there is a Qt way of doing things which I have not found. For instance, I have some friends that have successfully created the effects above using different tabs. That seems like a cheap answer, which I could use, but I'd like to believe that Qt has sufficient flexibility to let me build any kind of GUI.
Any suggestions would be helpful
---------------------Improved example--------------------
Let me use the example code that #m7913d gave. (http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwidgets-layouts-basiclayouts-example.html) Suppose that I want to make this portion of the gui into a reusable component which i can add to any GUI I want. How do I do that?
If this was C# I would create a new user control, add the GUI elements, set up the code that makes the unit work as a whole and possibly set up event listeners or properties of the user control as a whole. then I can instantiate, add, and remove them at will from the rest of the GUI. That is what I want.
I'm creating a bukkit plugin that's making a world in Minecraft outside the ordinary and that includes having NPCs (bots) entities that look like actually players and not villagers. I've already got the bots working programming wise but I want to have each bot have a different skin based upon it's name. Can I do this with maybe a resource pack or something? currently they take the names of Minecraft players with the same name but I'd like to override this.
TL;DR
Can I change the appearance of player entities by name with:
a Resourcepack?
a server side command?
playerConnection.sendPacket?
This is currently not possible without modifications to the client. If you want to, you can use Spoutcraft, but this requires users of the plugin to have the Spoutcraft launcher for the textures to show correctly.
There's no way to do this with the vanilla client, however, short of buying a bunch of Minecraft accounts and assigning them appropriate skins.
You should try out the DisguiseCraft plugin for a quick fix. DisguiseCraft is currently available on the Bukkit website. Do keep in mind that it also requires ProtocolLib to function properly, and you will need to have both installed on your server. You may find a link for ProtocolLib through the DisguiseCraft page. I currently use the two on my server and have had no issues with functionality.
If you would prefer a more direct approach however, since you are coding your own plugin, consider looking over the Lib's Disguises Developer API. Like DisguiseCraft, it too requires ProtocolLib, but the source for Lib's is publicly available and is intended to target developers. Just like DisguiseCraft, you may find a link for ProtocolLib through the Lib's page.
What is the best way for, using WinApi, find a given control in a external program window?
For example, I'm trying to change Internet Explorer's url text box. I am having trouble getting programatically the handle to the text box. I know its type is "Edit" but I'd like to avoid having to search through all the child windows for the "Edit" control (that's how I'm currently doing).
Is there any kind of unique identifier for a given control on a window? I tried using "Control ID" but it doesn't seem to be working.
Thanks
When you're delving into the windows of another application that wasn't designed to give you any particular special access to its windows, then you don't really have any simple solution. Functions like FindWindowEx, GetWindow, EnumChildWindows, and the rest are what you have to work with.
However, it's often not a great idea to even do this. Internet Explorer may have certain types of windows in a certain hierarchy in the particular version that you're developing against right now. But those windows and hierarchy may be different in previous versions and could be considerably different in future versions. You have no guarantee about these things.
In some cases, you might do well to investigate if there are alternative and more official ways to control the other program. For instance, Internet Explorer exposes a COM object that can be used for many purposes. Because this is an official interface, you have better guarantees about what previous versions this will be supported on and that it won't break for future versions.
The best way to do it is find it step by step.. E.g. Find the IE window with FindWindow, then find the child of that with FindWindowEx, then find the child of that with FindWindowEx ... until you get down to the textbox.
There is 1 program I can think of that will generate VB code from dragging a icon from the application to any part of any other application.. VB is way old but it'll give you a very good idea how to do it!
It's called API Spy, found under 'Downloadable Applications (Windows Only)' on http://patorjk.com/blog/software/
We may start converting an old VS2003 MFC project to use the fancy new features provided by the MFC Feature Pack and VS2008. Several of the new UI controls would be very nice except for one thing - they automatically save their information to the registry. I don't have a problem with the registry, but for the multiple environments the users use out program from, it's much easier to save user data to the database.
So, I'm hoping that there is one main "access the registry" function that could be overloaded to point the database. But brief investigation hasn't turned up anything. Has anyone else had any success doing something similar?
It seems like it should be possible to do what you're suggesting, according to the information on this page in MSDN. I haven't tried this myself, so I don't know how difficult it will be in practice.
According to the documentation, you should create a class that inherits CSettingsStore to read and write the settings, and call CSettingsStoreSP::SetRuntimeClass so that the framework uses your class instead of the default.
The MFC feature pack uses code supplied by BCGSoft and they added this feature (so you can save state to an XML file, database, etc.) way back in 2001. I don't have the feature pack on this PC but try looking for a class called something like CMFCRegistrySP.
I will check myself tomorrow.
Does the StateCollection sample do this?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb983406.aspx