Marcus' Macro Scheduler Blog

Dorian has just uploaded a video demonstrating his Screen Capture and Email script. Nice video, check it out:

Someone asked today how it might be possible to paste what is in the clipboard into an object using Macro Scheduler without having to use keystrokes.

It can be done by sending the WM_PASTE message using the SendMessage API function.

Here’s an example:

//Sending WM_PASTE to an object causes a clipboard paste, like sending CTRL-V

//constants - here we define the WM_PASTE constant
Let>WM_PASTE=770

//we need the handle of the object we want to send WM_PASTE to - 
// - as an example let's find the handle of Notepad's edit window
// - for this example make sure Notepad is running with empty document
// - so that the window title us "Untitled - Notepad".  Modify if needed

GetWindowHandle>Untitled - Notepad,hWndParent
FindObject>hWndParent,Edit,,1,hWnd,X1,Y1,X2,Y2,result

//now send WM_PASTE to it using SendMessage API
LibFunc>User32,SendMessageA,result,hWnd,WM_PASTE,0,0

The only benefit I can see with this is that it doesn’t require keyboard focus. In theory neither should ObjectSendKeys and a CTRL-V require keyboard focus. The latter is simpler so I’d tend towards using that. And there may be some applications that work at a higher level and actually expect to see CTRL-V or similar.

Never-the-less it’s a nice example of sending a Windows message and it may be useful for some. So here it is.

In this post from 2008 I demonstrated how to get data from Excel worksheets using Macro Scheduler’s database functions.

This works fine if Office is already installed on the PC.   But what if you want to get data from an Excel sheet and the PC you are running on doesn’t have Office installed?

Well you need the Office Data Connectivity Components which you can download from microsoft.com here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=23734

This will install the OLEDB/ODBC drivers which DBConnect can then use to make a connection to a workbook.  You can then use DBQuery to retrieve data from a sheet as shown previously.

Here’s a small piece of code which will tell you whether the current session is a Remote Desktop/Terminal Services session or not:

Let>SM_REMOTESESSION=4096
LibFunc>User32,GetSystemMetrics,isRemote,SM_REMOTESESSION
If>isRemote>0
    MessageModal>Current Session is RDP/Terminal Services Session
Else
    MessageModal>Current Session is Local Session
Endif

Did you know you can make just about any kind of schedule or trigger using Custom Event Triggers?

You’ll find the custom trigger option under Macro Properties in the Trigger tab.

Parsnipnose3000 has just posted a tip on Custom Event Triggers to the forums, showing how you can have a macro fire based on an image appearing on the screen. Check it out.

It occurred to me the other day while working on a script for a customer that I use this regular expression frequently:

(?<=TOKEN1).*?(?=TOKEN2)

It is very useful when parsing information out of web pages, or when finding elements in web pages.

What it does is pull out all the text between TOKEN1 and TOKEN2. Those could be other pieces of text, or html characters, or whatever.

As an example, recently I wrote a script which loops through all rows in an HTML table, and pulls out an order number, then looks this order number up in an Excel sheet. The order number appeared in a table cell along with other information. It was the first item inside an <i> (italics) tag and was followed by a space and then a hyphen. So I used this to pull it out of the row:

RegEx>(?<=<i>).*?(?= -),this_row,0,matches,nm,0

See how it looks for everything between the ‘<i>’ and ‘ -‘ (space then hyphen).

The next thing my code needed to do was find the ID of the single input field in the same row. This input was used to enter the order quantity, obtained from the Excel sheet. The ID is not something we know up front but it’s the only input field in the row. So I did this:

RegEx>(?<=id=").*?(?="),theInput,0,matches,nm,0

In other words, pull the text between id=” and “, which gives us the input’s ID value. We can then use that later to identify and fill the input field.

Regular Expressions are daunting at first. But eventually you find a small number of patterns help in many situations. This is one that I often find useful.

What’s your oft-used regular expression?

Since version 13.2 Macro Scheduler‘s email functions now support SSL. Google’s Gmail and many other email services now insist on SSL secured connections.

To use SSL you first need to install the OpenSSL library files.

Here’s an example of sending an email via Gmail:

Let>SMTP_AUTH=1
Let>[email protected]
Let>SMTP_PASSWORD=your_password
Let>SMTP_PORT=465
Let>SMTP_SSL=1
SMTPSendMail>[email protected],smtp.gmail.com,[email protected],your name,test,hello world,

And to retrieve emails from Gmail via POP3 (make sure you have enabled this in your gmail settings):

Let>POP3_PORT=995
Let>POP3_SSL=1
RetrievePOP3>pop.gmail.com,[email protected],your_password,c:\emails\in\