COBOL popup in ProcessList but not WinList

[maprwz]

I am encountering a COBOL popup window when the program errors. When I am running in foreground mode (a Remote Desktop session) my script can see both the window using WinList and the process using Process list. So I just send an {ENTER} to the window and everything is OK.

When I execute the same COBOL program and script in background mode (from a special client) I only get two windows using Winlist and the COBOL popup window is not one of them. However I do get all the same processes using ProcessList.

I need to send an {ENTER} to the COBOL popup window. I cannot just kill the process, because I need it to write out a .LOG file and it does not do that if I kill the process.

BTW: my server is Windows 2003

[maprwz]

I realized that I was only listing the windows that had titles. And since a lot of the titles are blank I wasn't seeing them.

When I printed out a the list from WinList() I found that is was providing handles and not PID's so I added this code to convert it:

$win = WinList()
  For $i = 1 to $win[0][0]
       $handle = $win[$i][1]
       $wtitle = $win[$i][0]
       $wpid = WinGetProcess ($handle)

Then I found that most of the time there were 3 windows for each process: one with a blank title, one with the title of the window and one with the name of the .EXE.

Using this I was able to match the Process to the window.

[maprwz]

Now that I had the window I wanted, I did a WinActivate and then a Send. But when I executed it in background, with my special client, nothing happened!

Adding some debugging code I found that the WinActivate failed. So what worked in the foreground did not work in background.

Edited May 30, 2008 by maprwz

[maprwz]

So drawing on previous experience with foreground and background tasks I determined that I would need to run the script on the desktop. The technique I used was:

• create a daemon and install it as a service with "Interact with Desktop". The daemon:

  - watches a directory for a script file

  - gets the script file name and uses Run() to execute the script

  - deletes the script file

• the routine that the special client uses builds the script and puts it into the daemon's directory

This techinque worked perfectly!!!