Macro Recording and Automating Windows with Macro Scheduler – Tips & News
Today I was asked how the outcome of a button click on a custom dialog could be altered if the ALT or CTRL key was pressed down at the time of the click. This is possible by trapping the dialog’s OnKeyDown and OnKeyUp handlers. Using these we can detect if ALT or CTRL is pressed/released […]
Some people have reported issue with the GetListItem command failing to work with some applications. While we investigate the issues we’ve created a small workaround. This is a .Net tool called ListInspector. It’s a command line tool which you can pass a listbox handle to and it will dump out a list of all the […]
In the forums this morning PepsiHog asked for some code to sort a string of numbers. We have a built-in method for sorting arrays. But here we want to sort a string of characters. E.g. we want the string “4731” to end up as “1347”. I ended up writing a reusable subroutine which will sort […]
I recently wrote a small macro for a customer which does an HTTPRequest via SSL. This requires that OpenSSL is installed. But the customer wanted to know if there was any way of distributing the macro to his users without having to install OpenSSL on all their PCs. Thanks to our wonderful forums one of […]
Over on the forums JRL asks how to get into the “Programming Zone” and once there how do you stay in it and cope with distractions and interruptions? Any tips? Add your thoughts and suggestions to the topic.
Can you send keystrokes to invisible or unfocused windows? The answer is yes, if the control you want to send the keystrokes into is a “windowed control”. That is, one that has a handle. If that’s too technical just try using the “Send Keys to Object Wizard” in Macro Scheduler 13 which generates code that […]
Need to measure how long a process or a set of commands in your script takes? We used to have to do this with VBScript’s Timer function. As of v13 Macro Scheduler has it’s own Timer function. Timer>result Returns the number of milliseconds that have elapsed since the script was started. So let’s say we […]
If you are connected to the Internet here’s an easy way of getting your public IP address by visiting checkip.dyndns.org: HTTPRequest>http://checkip.dyndns.org/,,GET,,HTMLResponse RegEx>[IPAddress],HTMLResponse,1,ips,num_ips,0 If>num_ips>0 MessageModal>Your IP is %ips_1% Else MessageModal>Error retrieving IP from checkip.dyndns.org Endif
Further to my post about the MacroScript SDK the other day, here’s an example of loading the MacroScript SDK COM object from PowerShell and running some Macro Scheduler code: $objMS = new-object -comobject “mscript.macroscript” $objMS.Init() $objMS.RunCode( “Run>notepad.exe” + [Environment]::NewLine + “WaitWindowOpen>Untitled – Notepad” + [Environment]::NewLine + “Wait>0.5” + [Environment]::NewLine + “Send>Hello World”, “”) $objMS.Cleanup() You […]
I’ve seen quite a lot of requests lately from people wanting to know how to extract text from web pages. Macro Scheduler’s optional WebRecorder add-on simplifies the automation of web pages and includes functions for extracting tables, text or HTML from web page elements. WebRecorder’s Tag Extraction wizard makes it easy to create the code. […]