When sending keystrokes to other applications remember that Macro Scheduler works much faster than a human being can type. Many applications do form field verification or background processing on the fly as the text is received. And most applications were designed on the assumption that a human being would be operating them. It may not have occurred to the developers that a robot might try to send a stream of text to the UI at the rate of 5000 characters a second!<\/p>\n
With some applications if you try to send too many characters at once you may find that some of those characters fail to show up, or the string is truncated. <\/p>\n
The solution should be obvious by now. That is to slow down the key send rate. You can do this easily by setting the SK_DELAY parameter which introduces a specified millisecond delay between each character.<\/p>\n
Let>SK_DELAY=20\r\nSend>long_string<\/pre>\nOf course you could break the long string down into smaller chunks and insert a delay between them:<\/p>\n
Send>part_1\r\nWait>0.3\r\nSend>part_2\r\nWait>0.2\r\nSend>part_3<\/pre>\nBut SK_DELAY is simpler and easier if you can’t control the length of the data easily.<\/p>\n
A related issue I see every now and then is when “tabbing” from one field to another on a form. Pressing the tab key moves the focus to the next field, so we use this while sending data into a form. Sometimes we’ll encounter an application which needs a bit of time after a field has been focused before it can accept data, or the other way around. So sending Tab immediately after\/before sending the data with no delay fails to work. Adding in a small delay between sending the data and the Tab solves it:<\/p>\n
Send>field_data\r\nWait>0.3\r\nPress Tab\r\n\r\nWait>0.3\r\nSend>next_field\r\nWait>0.3\r\nPress Tab\r\n\r\netc<\/pre>\nSimilarly when we need to tab through lots of fields at once without sending data we may try to save ourselves coding time by writing:<\/p>\n
Press Tab * 10<\/pre>\nBut if the app needs time to react between each tab we may have to split that out into separate tabs with delays between them or replace with a repeat\/until loop:<\/p>\n
Let>tabs=0\r\nRepeat>tabs\r\n Press Tab\r\n Wait>0.2\r\n Let>tabs=tabs+1\r\nUntil>tabs=10<\/pre>\nAs I’ve said many times before the most common causes of things not working as expected are either timing or focus. Macros run way faster than a human can type which is often beneficial but if things aren’t quite right start off by slowing the macro down a bit. You can always speed it up later!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When sending keystrokes to other applications remember that Macro Scheduler works much faster than a human being can type. Many applications do form field verification or background processing on the fly as the text is received. And most applications were designed on the assumption that a human being would be operating them. It may not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1263"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1263"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1271,"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1263\/revisions\/1271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}