This question is mostly just out of curiosity at what's possible. I'm interested to know any ideas at all.
If I'm on a website, is it possible to make a keyboard shortcut for clicking a button on that site? For example, if I'm on google.com, is it possible to write a script somewhere on my own system that will detect that I'm on google.com and make it so that if I press ctrl-g while that site is in focus, it will click Google Search?
If you know for sure that this isn't possible and have an explanation for why, I'd be interested to know that too.
Yes, it's possible.
I'll briefly describe how to do it in C# and Chrome, but it's not language-dependent and could be used in Edge or IE either.
Get the currently focused window by calling GetForegroundWindow API.
Get the process id by calling the GetWindowThreadProcessId API.
Get the process name by process id.
Proceed if it's Chrome.
Get access to UI Automation COM interface.
You will need to consume the COM interface in your language, but in C# it's quite easy: you'll need to add a reference to COM -> UIAutomationClient to your project. This will generate a wrapper for you, so the COM interface will be accessible in the code in a usual OO-style.
In Chrome, the Accessibility options must be enabled first to get access to UIA.
It could be done manually by navigating to chrome://accessibility/, but it's possible to do it programmatically as well.
Use UI Automation to detect the active URL.
You will need to find the Address bar in the UI tree using UIA by its Name or ClassName or another unique identifier.
You could first retrieve the UI Automation element for the Chrome window and then use the FindAll method to find the Address bar in the subtree to get its Value property which should contain the current URL.
Inspect tool will help you to investigate the Chrome UIA element tree and element properties (like Name or ClassName).
Do the same steps to find the Google Search button in the UI tree using UIA.
Call GetClickablePoint method to get its clickable point.
Click on the button programmatically using Win API.
To do this on a global shortcut, you could place a keyboard hook by calling SetWindowsHookEx API. Or use a library.
Here is another way.
That's it, easier than it looks.
Related
Using the context menu inside internet explorer allows you to inspect the element to see styles etc attached to a html element.
Is there anyway that you enable this functionality inside the webbrowser control?
(I am guessing it is not included to make it lighter, if so is there an alternative?)
It is not my intention to make this available to the client but it would certainly help when debugging the pages sent to the control in my winform application.
As no one seemed to bite on this question I have settled with using the following solution.
https://getfirebug.com/firebuglite#Stable
Using the instructions on this page I was able to press F12 on the webbrowser control to show a "Lite" version of Firebug, this allows me to happily inspect the elements.
Is it possible to inspect the main application menu of some already running application and execute commands from this menu? For example retrieve the whole main menu hierarchy of Safari and execute the File → New Tab command (by its name, not using the keyboard shortcut). I’m interested in an Objective-C solution.
One way to do this is using the Cocoa Accessibility API
For example,
NSAccessibilityPickAction Selects the
object, such as a menu item
You could use Applescript This is not exactly calling the menus but for a well written program provides the same functionality and using a defined and discoverable API.
To send the events see Scripting Bridge
The radio recently broke in our bedroom and as a result my missus now listen to various radio stations through her laptop. She moans that visiting various pages and clicking the 'listen' link is a bit of a pain. (Note to self: Must buy new radio!)
In the meantime, I have made a 'radio player' in VB 2008 Express, which is nothing more than 6 buttons down the left hand side of the 'player' I have created and a Web Browser Control on the right hand side.
Clicking each button links to the relevant player of the station she wants to listen to. (Being a newbie to VB and programming, I'm quite proud with what I've achieved so far!!)
Anyway, one station I do link to gives an "Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page" prompt: This one:
http://www.mygoldmusic.co.uk/
Well, thats the homepage of the site anyway, the actual player is here:
(Oops, seems I can only post one link! The actual player opens on-click of the 'listen' button then, sorry to be a pain!)
My question is: Is there a way to suppress this message in VB, or even auto-answer OK somehow?
The other sites I have linked to do not display this message, they just navigate away quite happily. Clicking OK on the prompt is no real hardship either, I hear you say, but in the interests of usability, I would just like it to navigate away from the site/player without prompting.
Remember, I'm using Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition. (I say that, because I've come across loads of sites that tell you how to do it with JavaScript, just not VB!)
I've got to the point of thinking it can't be done, but here's hoping!
Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated. And, sorry for the lengthy question. Hope it gives you enough info on what I'm trying to achieve.
Thanks in advance again.
J.
The only way I can think of is to actually modify the DOM of the page in the WebBrowser control. That popup is loading when the "window.onunload" event fires. You should be able to override this behaviour by modifying the DOM.
The HTML document DOM (Document Object Model, essentially an object graph of the page structure) is stored in the WebBrowser.HTMLDocument property. Unfortunately, that specific property isn't available to the .NET version. It IS available to COM however, so through some very ugly and messy code you might be able to suppress the event.
The following code should be able to access the COM property containing the HTML DOM. The type returned is IHTMLDocument2, although you'll note that the class itself will return an object. You might need to add a reference to mshtml.dll to get the IHTMLDocument2 interface access the properties of this in a reasonable way.
Dim domDocument As IHTMLDocument2 = webBrowser.HtmlDocument.DomDocument
You can then access the OnUnload event (which sits on the "window" element, one above the document). Unfortunately, the plot thickens a bit here (I did say it was going to be ugly) because you need to pass a IDispatch object to the onunload event. I've never done this specifically but I found a write-up at the following link that provides some samples and should point you in the right direction: http://blogs.msdn.com/cgarcia/archive/2009/08/28/handling-dom-events-in-a-c-activex.aspx
You should be able to follow a similar approach but simply do nothing in the handler method, which should suppress the javascript alert you are getting.
Get the handle to the dialog and destroy it. Use FindWindow and send a WM_CLOSE message to it.
I have code that opens a new window but I want to be able to edit the same one.
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("iexplore.exe", "http://www.live.com")
I'm not sure exactly but a good pointer to start off might be to get the handle of the window you're interested in:
http://www.pocketpcdn.com/articles/dotnetcf_hwnd.html
And then separately investigate what interop messages you can send to IE to change the URL in tab X
In order of increasing difficulty and increased control/power:
Send input text to your IE process. Alt-D to focus on the navigation bar, then the URL, then ENTER.
Use MSAA to find the navigation bar and send it text, as above.
Use MSAA to get IHTMLDocument access to the browser, and then programmatically drive the browser with that, and the related interfaces.
I don't know your exact scenario, but if you can host your own instance of MSHTML, or a WebBrowser control, it will make it a lot easier to get the interfaces and do the manipulations mentioned in #3 above; doing that stuff cross-process is fraught with peril.
I just did a web search and turned up a WatiN tool that apparently wraps a lot of this work; perhaps it would be useful for you.
If you are using 2008 there is a feature where you could create a second form and then add a Webbrowser control
the page could then be called by
myForm.show
The page could then be changed with the
Webbrowser1.Url = New Uri("http://www.google.com")
Use the following code:
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("http://www.live.com")
That is: do not invoke iexplore.exe directly – just let the system figure out which default browser to open.
This may yield two behaviours:
Either it opens a new tab in an existing Internet Explorer window,
or it creates a new window.
The important point is that this depends on a preference that can be controlled within the Internet Explorer application. If a new window opens, then this is the setting chosen by the user – do not try to override it: overriding the user’s preferences is considered bad manners.
If the users don’t want a new window opened, they can simply change that in their Internet Explorer preferences.
Shell ("explorer.exe www.google.com")
is how I'm currently opening my products ad page after successful install. However I think it would look much nicer if I could do it more like Avira does, or even a popup where there are no address bar links etc. Doing this via an inbrowser link is easy enough
<a href="http://page.com"
onClick="javascript:window.open('http://page.com','windows','width=650,height=350,toolbar=no,menubar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,location=no,directories=no,status=no'); return false")">Link text</a>
But how would I go about adding this functionality in VB?
If you want it to look professional, you need to use an actual browser component. VB.NET comes with one. If you are using an older version of VB, you'd need to go third party. If you want to stay with a shell open, you would have to individually target the browser command-line and pass arguments to indicate that it should not have toolbars etc.
Speaking as a user, I find castrated popup windows annoying and unproductive.
So my answer is: "don't".