Comments on: Window GUI Automation from PowerShell

By: Jaykul

Jaykul — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:11:37 +0000

Yes it should! At the very least you should be able to select it as the “active” window

By: Jaykul

Jaykul — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 00:49:10 +0000

Yeah, that should be possible. If it’s modal, it should be the “active” window anyway, so you should be able to get it that way, or just send-keys and have them go to it by default…

By: seaJhawk

seaJhawk — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:40:02 +0000

Hi Jaykul,
My app that I'm trying to automate pops up a modal dialog when I click a key. However, I can't find any way to select that modal dialog – should this be possible?

Thanks,
seaJhawk

By: Joel 'Jaykul' Bennett

Joel 'Jaykul' Bennett — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:28:04 +0000

For CTP2, you need to either put the dll into a specific folder … Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Packages\WindowsAutomation\WindowsAutomation.dll in which case you’ll be able to call just:

Add-Module WindowsAutomation

Otherwise, you can load it by specifying the path to the actual .dll:

Add-Module .\WindowsAutomation.dll

By: rama

rama — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:05:00 +0000

hi,

If I do Add-module I am getting this error.

F:\windowautomation>
Add-Module .\WindowAutomation
Add-Module : The specified module ‘.\WindowAutomation’ was not loaded because the module source file was not found in any package
directory,
At line:1 char:11
+ Add-Module <<<< .\WindowAutomation

By: rama

rama — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:00:44 +0000

Hi,

I am using CTP2 only can you please guide me how can I install

bacaz Installutil is not recognised as a cmdlet. It will be helpful for me how to install the GUI Automation Snapin from the scrach.

Do I need any other .exe to proceed the installation. The snapin which is not working out for me.

thanks in advance

By: Joel 'Jaykul' Bennett

Joel 'Jaykul' Bennett — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:26:32 +0000

You need to run “Get-Help about_signing” as it suggests. By default PowerShell requires everything to be cryptographically signed. My stuff isn’t, so you have to use the “Set-ExecutionPolicy” cmdlet to set your policy to “RemoteSigned”... and you might have to “unblock” the script (this is all described in the “Get-Help about_signing” document.

If you’re using CTP2, you can use Add-Module instead of using the installer.

Also, you should use the version on CodePlex because it’s been updated from the one I posted. I’ve changed that in the article.

By: rama

rama — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 05:36:58 +0000

Hi,

How can I install the windows automation snapin in my power shell environment. I am getting an error like

File C:\Documents and settings\test\Desktop\windowautomation\WindowAutomation\Install.ps1 cannot be loaded. The file C:\Documents and Settings\test\Desktop\windowautomation\WindowAutomation\Install.ps1 is not digitally signed. The script will not execute on the system. Please see “get-help about_signing” for more details..
At line:0 char:0

By: Joel 'Jaykul' Bennett

Joel 'Jaykul' Bennett — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:30:12 +0000

Hm, looks like I messed up the parameter sets somehow. I’ll have to push out a new release on CodePlex.

Select-Window doesn’t seem to like selecting the console windows … and I don’t know why (that is to say, I’ll have to crack the code open, so gimme a few days). They show up if you do Select-Window | ? {$_.ProcessName -eq "powershell"} …

Get-WindowPosition and Remove-Window are broken because I messed up their parameter sets — they can’t resolve which parameter set to use, because they have two sets which are basically identical. That was a typo on my part. Luckily, you can use the Position attribute on the Window objects, and the CloseMainWindow() and CloseProcess() methods…

Send-Keys seems to work fine here … either via the pipeline or as an argument:

$np = Select-Window notepad

Send-Keys $np "what?"

Select-Window notepad | Send-Keys "%{f4}n"

By: Evan

Evan — Mon, 19 May 2008 14:42:23 +0000

I am having some problems running this code. Here are some of them I’ve run across so far:

1)for some strange reason “select-window powershell“ doesn’t return anything even though “select-window notepad“ does

for the following problems, “$window = select-window notepad“

2)Both “get-windowposition $window” and “$window | get-windowposition” will not recognize $window as a parameter

This happens with remove-window, and send-keys

3) “set-windowposition -width 2” does nothing and “set-windowposition $window -maximize “ gives and error

I can send the code I am trying with the errors if necessary