Remote Application Control

[CheifDruid]

Greetings everyone!

I'm new to AutoIt, (though I downloaded version 3.x over a year ago, I found I never had a practical use for it!), I am not new to VB / VBScript environments and am familiar with scripting / coding concepts.

I now have a practical scenario which I would be grateful for peoples opinions / advice.

I must admit that I have yet to read the help file, I will do it as I believe the answers are probably in both the help file & this forum.

The scenario:

I have a remote user, bless him, that connects across the internet to my SSL secure server. There he can login and gain access to a remote shared folder to upload / download etc.

I'm looking for / to create a solution that will allow him to kick off and process a remote application - he has no need to 'see' what is being run on the remote app. and would only be interested in the results.

In order to accomplish this I need him to:

- Firstly kick-off the remote app when needed.

- Provide to this remote application a list of actions/activities that need to be carried out.

- When complete, download to his PC the results of the actions/activities if he so desires.

I believe, from what I've read on the forum, that he can run a compiled script on his PC that could provide a comprehensive list of actions that he can select / carry out / fire off on the remote app.

This will generate an 'actions' script? - this is where I'm not too sure, I feel I'm looking for some form of 'on-the-fly' remote script generation or some form of options file, upload the script/file to the remote shared folder.

AutoIt could monitor the remote folder, upon seeing the script, the remote end launches the script and carries out all necessary work (invoke the app, select options, commence work etc).

I've been looking at 'zfisherdrums'posted 'mini file watcher'with the aim of modifying it for my purposes.

Finally the script informs the 'client' end upon completion or not!

If anybody has any thoughts, opinions, suggestions, observations etc they would be warmly recieved (and probably acted upon!!)

With kind regards & thanks in advance

Jon

[The Kandie Man]

Welcome to the forum.

Everything that you want to do is possible with Autoit, however, keep in mind that AutoIt is more like a programming language than something that generates action scripts. This doesn't mean that autoit can't generate scripts, but there is no real need to have it dynamically create scripts that follow the users precise instructions. A compiled script is quite capable of interpreting a user's input and from there it can perform various logic operations to determine precisely what it has to do.

You can create a GUI for the user to input the settings, you can have the compiled AutoIt script save the settings to an INI file and read them every time it starts up, you can have it contact web servers via INETGet or you can do it manually using TCP functions for which you can write your own library of user defined functions to connect to your specific server, and you can have the script perform various tasks when a user closes the script.

What you are asking to do is fairly complex and will probably take you some time to construct(working out all the bugs and such), so you have been warned, but everything that you have asked for is quite possible in AutoIt.

If you wanted, you could also have AutoIt generate dynamic scripts and then have it run them by running its own compiled executable with the following line of code:

Run(@AutoItExe & ' /AutoIt3ExecuteScript "DynamicallyCreatedScript.au3"')

- The Kandie Man ;-)

Edited May 25, 2007 by The Kandie Man