How can I begin the spell check process for selected text / all text using the COM interface? There's an executeMenuCommand for javascript, but seems like there's no alternative for the COM interface.
I hate it when this happens! I walk away, and take a stab from a different angle!
((InDesign.MenuAction)app.MenuActions["Check Spelling..."]).Invoke();
Where app is the COM application. The cast is unnecessary, but allows you to see the properties of the menu action.
Related
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.
I'm looking to start a new programming language and for my first task I want to overlay some text on another applications window, similar to the guy in this post:
Overlay text on some else's window - HUD
Clearly from that post, this can be done in VB.NET, and extrapolating from that, I can probably safely assume that C++\C# can also do this similarly.
My question is; are there any other languages that can do the same? Can Ruby do it? :)
I'm looking for the following capabilities:
Enumerate open windows to find the one I want to overlay on top of.
Overlay text on the 3rd party apps window. (Rich text is a bonus)
Detect window bounds so I can resize the text when the user resizes the window.
Allow click-through of my created text so it doesn't interfere with the 3rd party apps functionality.
Any ideas?
If you want to use Ruby, you have two options: IronRuby and "classic Ruby".
I guess IronRuby would be the preferred option on Windows as it runs on top of .NET and has access to full Windows API through that.
If .NET is too much for your needs and you need to do something simple, then classic Ruby might be a better fit.
For classic Ruby, check out these pages:
Ruby and Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows Support
Beware: argument packing and unpacking is not very convenient.
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.
How do you add an item to the system context menu? I would like to let my users be able to right click anywhere and launch this program. I cannot seem to find it documented anywhere either.
Thanks for your help!
I am coding in vb.net
What you're looking for is creating a Shell Extension Handler for Windows Explorer.
Reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb776881(VS.85).aspx
Unfortunately doing this in a .Net application is a bit of a problem due to the way in which the CLR is loaded for COM plug-in style extensions. Raymond did a great job of exploring this problem here
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/12/18/1317290.aspx
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".