Question:
We use NT 4 WS as the client to our PeopleSoft (Oracle) application, and we need to pick off the information contained on the panel fields. We can easily read the fields that can be updated using a fairly easy-to-use script package (WinBatch from WindowWare), but we need to capture the read-only fields as well. Is there a utility or a C++ Windows program out there that will allow us to figure out all the contents of a Window? I can program in C++, but I haven’t done much in the way of Windows programming since the early SDK days.
Answer:
Since you have programmed in Windows before, you know that Windows mean, well, windows. You can use a utility like Spy (comes with VB 5.0 and C++ and probably other programming languages) to determine the actual windows on the application screen. Given the window (and its associated handle), you can query it as to its contents (i.e., text in a textbox, items in a listbox, etc). However, some items are not windows, but text written directly to a window. For example, for efficiency, many of the “windows” in Excel are not really a window but just text printed on the screen.
