Detecting child windows (and closing them)

[DanielF847]

I am writing an application that interfaces with a piece of wrestling tourney software to export data regularly. I can use winmenuselectitem to access the menu item that I need, but child windows block input to the parent window until they are closed. I have been looking all over the forums and racking my brain, and I can't figure out a way to detect if any windows are open and close them so that the data can be exported.

winactivate will activate the window, but any commands aren't sent until the child windows are closed.

attached is a screenshot of the window info for both windows.(the window info overlaps its respective window) (the software is TWT by pes-sports)

http://imgbucket.info/photo/n1oozxe6s/Untitled.jpg

Thank you in advance, and if you need any more information let me know.

Daniel

[DanielF847]

oh and the window on the left would be the parent window, and the one on the right would be an example child window.(which is blocking interaction with the former)

[JLogan3o13]

Hi DanielF847. Do you want the second window closed any time that it pops up? If so, check out AdLibRegister in the Help file. Something like this will check for the existence of that window every 250ms and close it if it is detected.

AdlibRegister("SelectMatch")
Func SelectMatch()
    If WinActive("Select Match") Then
        WinClose("Select Match")
    EndIf
EndFunc

If you're looking for something that closes it only when you're performing a certain function, you can still use AdLibRegister, you just need to work in the logic for your action.

Edited January 11, 2012 by JLogan3o13

[DanielF847]

Thank you for your reply JLogan3of13

The issue is that there are various windows that are open. windows like "Select Match" "Change Result" "Select Weight ..." etc. maybe 15-20 possibilities. and then I have to cope with the existence of their own child windows.

Also, I am getting better at scripting and realize that I don't want my script to rely on whether or not a window is active at any given time. This is the basic premise of my application...

TWT has an export format that allows for things like publishing brackets and results to the web. frustratingly enough, it does not automatically update. updating takes time, so I would like it to happen transparently so the script should

Wait for a specified amount of time (say 5 minutes)

GuiWindow opens asking if I would like to update

The window contains a countdown and a "postpone" key

if the countdown reaches zero (like I'm not at the computer) then the software updates

To update, the script has to access the publish menu in "The Wrestling Tourney" window

I would like the script to be robust enough to know whether or not that would work and close other child windows if it would not. (if they are blocking input)

because it is frustrating to get back to my computer during the tournament and find that the script hasn't updated because you had a bracket open

Then, of course repeat (updating in another 5 minutes)

if someone could just point me in the right direction, I'd be happy to turn this into a reuseable code snippet, but I'm totally lost on how to accomplish this (while making it robust enough that I won't come back to a tourney thats waiting to update)

[BrewManNH]

Do a search for the function _ProcessGetChildren, it might be of some use to get the PID of the child windows so that you can close them when they pop up.

[DanielF847]

_processgetchildren didn't exactly help, but it did get me to the answer.

I ended up using a user created code snippet (function _ProcessGetWindow($pid) ) to find all windows for a process, and then eliminated all of the windows that I did not want. (up until the first one IE the parent)

_processGetWindow($pid) returns an array where array[0] = the number of windows and array[1] to array[number of windows] returns the handle of its respective window. array[1] is always the topmost window. so I wrote a function to eliminate of the top windows until a certain number are left...

a little sloppy but it gets the job done for my purposes.

#include <array.au3>
Func closeChildren($pid, $leaveopen)
$window = _ProcessGetWindow($pid)
for $i = 1 To $window[0]-$leaveopen
  WinClose($window[$i])
Next
EndFunc

to use it, make sure to head over to the thread below and grab the code for _processgetwindow from RulerOf

I think this thread can be close now, Thanks guys!

(and thanks BrewMan for pointing me in the right direction)

Daniel

PS. Thanks to RulerOf for providing the _ProcessGetWindow($pid, $p_ReturnBestGuess = False ) function