Black out a remote window from edge to edge.

[NassauSky]

Wanted to start a new topic since it's not only related to a webdriver app I was working on.  It's more of probably a windows API trick or something like that.

As I was playing with locking down a remote browser window, I was able to blacken out the whole chrome windows from edge to edge. I wish I remember how I did that unless it was a windows fluke.  If anyone knows how to make that magic happen, it would be great. 

Disabling the window was not the objective but I was able to somehow paint the whole remote window black (though I wasn't working with paint API's).

I was playing with the following API's when this happened

#include <WinAPI.au3>
#include <WindowsConstants.au3>
#include <Constants.au3>

Run("C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe")
$sTestApp = "New Tab - Google Chrome"
WinWait($sTestApp)
$hWnd = WinGetHandle($sTestApp)
ConsoleWrite($hWnd & @CRLF)
$iStyles = _WinAPI_GetWindowLong($hWnd, $GWL_STYLE)
_WinAPI_SetWindowLong($hWnd, $GWL_STYLE, BitXOR($iStyles, $WS_SIZEBOX))
_WinAPI_SetWindowLong($hWnd, $GWL_EXSTYLE, BitXOR($iStyles, $WS_MINIMIZEBOX, $WS_MAXIMIZEBOX))

 

Edited September 25, 2020 by NassauSky

[Danp2]

What's your ultimate goal? There may be a better solution than blacking out the screen.

[NassauSky]

I'm creating a statistics scraper for staff and want to keep them from seeing anything in the window as it's capturing it's data. Some sites I use that have responsive designs, don't make it easy to capture if i resize the screen to just a small block.

Edited September 25, 2020 by NassauSky

[Danp2]

Just run the browser in headless mode.

[NassauSky]

Thanks @Danp2

I'm hooking up to lots of resource servers and I don't think the IE UDF allowed that (headless mode) but now that I'm using webdriver with chrome, I can try that. For some reason I think I tried that a while back and it didn't work for some sites statistics but I'll try that again. 

I still want to keep this question out here if anyone knows the magic behind what I might have done to blacken the whole window. 😇

Edited September 25, 2020 by NassauSky