Macro Recording and Automating Windows with Macro Scheduler – Tips & News
Scheduling User Interface (UI) automation macros to occur when Windows is logged off or locked is problematic. A full user session needs to be active for a UI macro to work. Why is this? Windows consists of “Window Stations” and “Desktops”. A window station is a secure object that contains a clipboard, a set of […]
Want to automate a mouse wheel event? I posted an answer in the forum showing how to do this here: Roll the mouse wheel?
Probably the simplest way to parse XML, such as an RSS feed, is to use Microsoft’s MSXML object which is built into Windows. I wrote a very quick and dirty routine using MSXML2 to download and parse this blog’s RSS feed. All it does is put the title, link and content of each item into […]
Update 7th April 2008: Macro Scheduler 10.1 now has native database functions built in so in most cases it is no longer necessary to use the ADODB object in VBScript as described below. See Using Macro Scheduler’s Database Functions The best way to access (retrieve, modify, or insert) data from a database with Macro Scheduler […]
I helped someone today who was trying to record a web form that performed a file upload. File uploads are handled using an INPUT tag of type FILE. Unfortunately it turns out that these can’t be scripted for security reasons. Microsoft has prevented applications from setting the value property of these types of object. The […]
I’ve just posted an example in response to a message on the forum where someone needed to extract data from finance.yahoo.com. The easiest way to create code to extract data from a page is to use WebRecorder‘s Tag Extractor. Unfortunately, finance.yahoo.com shows random adverts above the data and the HTML used to display the adverts […]
There’s a new post on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer blog on using the keyboard to get around IE and some new keyboard shortcuts in IE7. Very useful for those times when you need to automate IE’s interface with Macro Scheduler: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/02/08/527702.aspx See also: Keyboard Shortcuts
I’ve added two new scripts to the Scripts & Tips forum. How to run a process and kill and restart it if it is taking too long: http://www.mjtnet.com/usergroup/viewtopic.php?t=2574 How to write to the Application Event Log: http://www.mjtnet.com/usergroup/viewtopic.php?t=2577
This is something that comes up often, so I thought I’d mention it here. Every so often we get asked how to put a date into a filename. Say you want to rename or save a file with the date in the filename formatted to reportsYYYYMMDD.txt e.g.: reports20061801.txt Well the simplest way to do this […]
I’ve added some scripts to the Scripts & Tips forum: A script to Monitor Startup Programs. Useful for detecting rogue apps like spyware etc Is Drive Ready. A function to determine whether the drive is ready or not. Automatically Create a System Restore Point. Useful at the start of a script that installs software or […]