Non standard window controls and ways to overcome it with AutoIt

[thehighway]

Hey guys Intern here working in Software Quality Assurance

I work with very simple interface testing, which is basically clicking on shit until you find an error

Heres the problem

The software I want to automate does NOT use standard window controls, meaning I cannot use Au3Info.exe to find the control ID to pass into ControlClick()

What I need to achieve with autoit here is very simple,

1: Click on a button or menu

2: Navigate and click its sub menus

3: Sleep as it waits for results

4: Take a screenshot

5: Repeat for each sub menu/button function

I used to use Vermont HighTest to automate this simple sequence, but the main issue was that I was dealing with absolute x y coordinates.

I believe autoit is much better and advanced than HighTest, and want to know if there is a way to accomplish this without having to resort to recording coordinates manually (it gets very tedious), rather maybe using an OCR or something.

The Pixelsearch would work but only for those functions with icons next to them.

ultimately,

How do I get the x y coordinates of text on screen and have autoit click it, then get x y coordinates of another text and click that, etc etc

My main goal here is to use autoit to find interface crashes and inconsistent results by clicking each and every button/menu option.

Thanks!

[youknowwho4eva]

I always perfer to use tab keys and either enter or space, which ever activates the button. then for menu items just use alt and the underlined letter. I dont know much about the other stuff, plus this is usually pretty accurate.

[thehighway]

I always perfer to use tab keys and either enter or space, which ever activates the button. then for menu items just use alt and the underlined letter. I dont know much about the other stuff, plus this is usually pretty accurate.

The problem I have is that these controls do not have a keyboard shortcut key

Heres a picture

[thehighway]

An easier example would be automating a click in notepad

how would you get autoit to click the file menu and then new without using x y coordinates or the alt shortcuts? Rather, let autoit detect where "File" is and click it. I used the windowinfo and got nothing for the ID.

Please help, first time ive used autoit

[try67]

how would you get autoit to click the file menu and then new without using x y coordinates or the alt shortcuts? Rather, let autoit detect where "File" is and click it. I used the windowinfo and got nothing for the ID.

This sounds like an extremely complicated procedure. You need to write code that will be able to recognize every character in a font, taking into consideration font size, color, properties (bold, italic) and so on.

[thehighway]

This sounds like an extremely complicated procedure. You need to write code that will be able to recognize every character in a font, taking into consideration font size, color, properties (bold, italic) and so on.

I dont think its that complicated, even though I never wrote a complete autoit script before, i do have programming experience.

I was hopign to use a pre existing OCR, but I cant seem to find one that returns an x and y