WinWaitActive with unknown title

[tomasvorobjov]

#1: I have a script that does stuff to input (from AutoIt), then continues to process new input and so on... Everything works fine, but sometimes the input processing (by my application) will fail due to various reasons (API temporarily inaccessible, input was not valid etc). Therefore, I need to determine when an error occurs to handle it.

If everything works fine, I can do WinWaitActive( "My Application" ) to know when to continue, however, the errors produce a "popup" with unpredictably random messages. How can I simply check for when the next window becomes available/ready, no matter what the title is and then use the title to determine if my previous action was successful or not. That is, i'd like to do the following

process input
(wait until "My Application" is available) or (wait until "Error" is available)
- handle error
(wait until "My Application" is available)
process input

#2: In a similar manner, when "My Application" starts I use WinWaitActive( "My Application" ) to determine when I can send input to it to start processing. However, occasionally (which is again, unpredictable) a pop-up will show up (with some title). How can I check for this happening. Basically, in pseudo code I'd like to do this:

(wait until "My Application" is available) or (wait until "Popup" is available)
- handle the popup
(wait until "My Application" is available)

Thank you

[water]

A time consuming way is to wait for the error window to pop up for a limited time.

Use WinWaitActive ("title" , "text" , timeout)

Another possible way is to start a second script that checks for the popups and does what is needed to click them away. My OutlookEX UDF uses this approach with the _OL_Warnings script started by function _OL_Open.

[czardas]

If you don't know the title of the unpredictable popup window, then perhaps you could test the active window title, compair it to the main program window title and close the current active window if the titles do not match. This approach does have some serious drawbacks to consider. If a window from a different program appears then you may not wish to automatically close it. For example the window could contain an important windows message. Just some thoughts.

[water]

Another solution:

Get a list of all Windows using function WinList

For each entry in the returned array use the handle to call WinGetProcess

If the processID is the same as the processID of the running script (@AutoItPID) you know it's a window of the running program

Close all windows which don't have the required title

Edit:

Found this with the code ready to run.

Edited November 6, 2011 by water

[czardas]

water

[water]

Hi czardas,

thanks for the compliment.

A glass of Lagavulin just cleared my brain. Slàinte!