Spoofing the operating system

[leuce]

G'day everyone

I know that it is possible to communicate with an application using Send commands, thereby interacting with its menu or internal shortcut functions, but is it possible to spoof the hidden communication which the operating system has with the program (and vice versa) so that I can make the program do things "behind the scenes"? I suspect that this is possible, although I might have to learn quite a few new things to accomplish it. For example, I might want Notepad to open a document without letting the user see the File Open dialog box (one moment Notepad is empty, the next moment the document appears in it). This is not for dishonest purposes -- I just want to keep things as simple as possible from the user's point of view (and I also want things to happen fast). As another example, if the user selects File -> Save As in Notepad, and types in a file name, I want to be able to capture the file name directly after (or directly before) Notepad saves the file (this is so that I can do things with the file, or perform certain tasks based on the name of that file, eg create a folder with the name of the file, etc).

Can anyone point me in the right direction here? I'm quite a newbie but if I know what I'm talking about then I can research the topic myself.

In particular I would like to use this for interacting with a slow Java-based program whose controls are not named and therefore not reliably callable using the normal Send methods.

Thanks

Samuel

[jvanegmond]

This is such a general description that I can only point you in the direction of the helpfile! With that, the only limits that you have are those of your own creativity and ability to program. Please ask a more specific question, if possible with a script, and you will get a more specific answer.

[lod3n]

This might be better addressed outside of AutoIt, and in the shell itself.

In Windows XP, when you create a shortcut to a program exe, you will find a tab in the shortcut properties window called Compatability. From there, you can spoof your OS to the application that the shortcut calls.

Hope that's what you're looking for.