Does anyone have any pointers on where to start with this?
I'm using MS UI Automation to do some acceptance testing of an application, but the MenuStrip control doesn't support MSUIA, and apparently the only way to get what I want from it is Active Accessibility (MSAA).
Sadly, there appears to be very little available on how to act as a MSAA client in C#.
If anyone has any pointers I'd appreciate it!
As far as I know, you have to use COM interop to write a MSAA client in C#.
Related
I am having some issues installing IUIAutomation if anyone could head me in the correct direction would be greatly appreciated. I'm attempting to get tab information from Microsoft edge
I could be totally wrong, I just started working with UI Automation myself, but as far as I understood IUIAutomation is working with C++, whereas the managed UI Automation API is for usage with C#. I played a bit around with UI Automation in C#, but for some reason I don't know, I don't get all the events. This is because I'm going to look into IUIAutomation next.
If you'd like to use UI Automation with C# you have to add it (UIAutomationClient and UIAutomationTypes) as references in your Visual Studio project.
I hope my answer helps a bit.
Cheers!
If you're trying to access the "IUIAutomationElement" or similar declarations, you'll need to reference the COM version of the UIAutomationClient (v1.0). You can find it on the same Reference Manager window as the .NET Framework version (using VS2017), you just need to search under the COM section instead of the Assemblies section.
If you're just looking to access "AutomationElement", you should be ok using the .NET Framework version. I mainly try to use this one, unless I need to access the LegacyIAccessible values without using a wrapper.
Let me know if this doesn't help, or you need more info.
I looking to try and automate UI tests of Microsoft Dynamics AX (All Versions). I intend on using free and open source tools only.
What framework is the UI of Microsoft Dynamics AX built in? I had heard it may be WPF but I had had no luck so far as to finding much information around this.
I have tried using autoit but it cannot find controls as I expected.
I have tried using the microsoft UI automation stuff and using patterns found by Inspect but I get errors running when running the code saying the pattern is unsupported and it has no supported patters.
Has anyone had any experiance in trying to do this or has anyone got any information around this, anything may prove to be useful.
Cheers,
Teststack.White tool may be useful though it's based on the Microsoft UI Automation API.
I'm looking for a library that can be used in native .NET code, just like any .NET assembly. The purpose of the library must be to automate Windows (push a button, select a window, send keys, record & playback, that sort of thing).
So: the library is supposed to be used natively in .NET, but the automation itself must be able to target any native or .NET Windows application that can receive user input.
Suggestions so far:
benPearce suggested AutoIt. It has a DLL, which is native Win32 but not native .NET and cannot be used without use of .NET Interop.
Chris Dunaway suggested Global Mouse Keyboard Lib. This came closest, but is not an automation lib. It just helps setting up keyboard and mouse hooks.
pm100 suggested Microsoft's WPF UI Automation. This one is pretty good, albeit that it's not available if you develop in .NET 2.0 and it requires the WPF to be installed on the system. It can, however, automate everything from Win32 apps to HTML in a browser.
JasonTrue suggested WebAI from ArtOfTest. This is a testing framework mainly geared towards browsers and web applications. It is unfortunately not well suitable for use for Windows automation.
If nothing else appears available, I'll probably choose Microsoft's UI Automation and upgrade any projects that require it that are still in .NET 2.0 to .NET 3.5, if possible. But I hope for a more widely applicable automation framework (.NET prior to 2.0 does not need to be supported).
Have you looked at the White framework?
I have used AutoIt in the past with success.
microsoft's own built in one is fine
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms747327.aspx
not restricted to wpf as some seem to think.
If you haven't seen it yet, and a commercial library is acceptable, you might check out Ranorex:
http://www.ranorex.com/
I used Ranorex 1.5 quite a bit to write small C# UI automation utilities. It was pretty effective! Development seemed faster compared to using the MS UI Automation API directly, since Ranorex has a lot of useful convenience methods already available.
I haven't used Ranorex 2 very much yet, though.
In Ranorex 1.5, there was also support for traditional Win32 development in C++, but I didn't use it. As far as I know, that's still available in Ranorex 2.
I can't speak to the quality of the record/playback support in Ranorex since I never used that feature.
One final plus: Their support team was really responsive and helpful anytime I emailed them.
This library is pretty interesting and is fairly simple. Perhaps it will help you.
Check out Tools for automated GUI testing on windows
I would still suggest FlaUI for autoamating .Net Desktop,Mobile apps. Its based on Microsoft UIA libraries and have support for external controls like the DevExpress Grid too
Moreover, it is built on top of TestStack.White so indeed a very good library and has a github page also
I have used WebAii from ArtOfTest with a fair degree of success in automating integration testing for a Silverlight app. It also supports WinForms and Web applications.
Microsoft UI Automation, the successor to Active Accessibility, can do almost all of the Windows UI automation you would need.
How about CSharpScript, here's an article about it on Codeproject, and here's the link to the main website. Furthermore, it is familiar C#, scripted which can be used to automate anything.
Hope this helps,
Best regards,
Tom.
is there better way to automate c# gui applications including datagridview and its internally added controls using python I tried with PywinAuto is there any other tool/ module available in python? Plz let me know
If you are looking at PyWinAuto, then I assume you are asking about free/open-source, as opposed to commercial support. There are a host of commercial tools available. AutoIT and white are good ones to check out.
I think it's possible to somehow hook with the windows environment (specifically explorer.exe) and trigger specific things, for example launching control panel and using it as if I had mouse (meaning I'm clicking the interface from the code).
Basically what I'm trying to do is automate some redundant tasks I do often, just I don't know how it's done, or even how it's called. Anyone can point me in right direction?
Thanks!
Forget about "automated clicking". GUI tools are just front-ends to control the system. You can control the system like they do, it will be much easier.
Huge possibilities can give you Microsoft Management Console. Each "snap-in" can be accessed via COM model. Some of them have GUI front-ends, find and fire "*.msc" files (somewhere in Windows directory) to try them.
There is many command line tools i.e. "net" command has huge abilities related to networking.
PowerShell may be a better choice instead of C# or C++, it's designed for task automation. You can easily use COM, .NET, MMC ...
Windows Explorer has a COM object model that you can call from both C# and C++. (Most of the examples on MSDN are in Javascript or VBScript, which I guess aren't your languages of choice, but they demonstrate that the API is straightforward to call.)
AutoHotKey is a scripting environment specifically designed for this sort of task
If you want mostly to launch control panel you can do using RunDll32 interface existing in the most control panel applets. See http://www.osattack.com/windows-7/huge-list-of-windows-7-shell-commands/ , http://support.microsoft.com/kb/167012 or http://www.winvistaclub.com/t57.html for example. For the corresponding API see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/164787.
Another option is usage of control.exe (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc144191.aspx and http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/control.htm).
If you google more you will find much more examples which you can to automate a lot of things without using of some general ways to automate GUI.
At more or less the lowest level within Win32, you can use the SendMessage() API to send raw click messages to windows of interest. This will rely on a lot of intrusive knowledge about the apps you intend to drive. However, you could easily implement a "click recorder" that could replay click sequences captured from user interaction.