Easiest way to control multiple applications

[Skiver Veteran]

Hi Guys,

 

My job role is evolving at the moment to include a bit of QA and one thing that has come up on my next project is finding a way to automate certain behaviours in an application. Right now it is simply scrolling a window up and down. I have a VB script that will do this nicely but the issue is it relies upon the window being active and my issue now is I need to replicate the behaviour in about 500 - 700 applications at the same time. We certainly don't have the resource to be able to run that amount of Virtual Machines and currently we are looking at running 20-30 applications on around 20-30 VM's which is causing me the issue with my script.

 

So to the actual question, I assume it will be possible to point a script at a PID rather than just what's on screen but can you guys recommend what may be the easiest way to do this? Should I stick with VB or is there potentially something else out there that may be easier? 

 

If you have any suggestions on ways I could achieve this and any tips etc it would be appreciated, I've never really had to do this sort of thing outside of me playing around so quite new to all of this. I don't have any real knowledge on scripting so I am happy to go with anything as it's all going to be a steep learning curve.

[Lant]

http://www.sikuli.org/ is something that I have used before to do a little bit of automation of GUIs. The idea is that you take screenshots and then script based on them, you just consider them to be variables.
This still relies on the window being active to perform the interactions.

If you could start up a VM in headless mode with multiple monitors attached then you could have programs on different virtual monitors and have actions performed on them there.

What other sorts of automation do you need to perform?

I'm not sure how good (or feasible) this suggestion is, but you hook into the message loop and send some events via there to simulate user interaction.
This may not need a window to be active, but it would be much more complicated to develop.

Also, in my experience switching the active window programmatically has been a pain in the ass.
(We wanted to start up a keylogger, switch to a browser, enter text in it and see if that text was captured. Getting the focus to shift to the browser was difficult in our environment.)

[snaphat (Myles Landwehr) Member]

What about nircmd? It can do all kind of random interactions with windows:

 

http://nircmd.nirsoft.net/win.html

[Skiver Veteran]

Thanks guys,

 

Sikuli looks a little more promising but with the amount of apps I need to run, I'm not sure I will be able to get them all on screen enough for that to work.

 

Nircmd looks like its more focused on one application at a time, basically I need to be able to scroll a specific pane in mutliple applications at once. It doesn't have to be all 20 at the very same time and at the same rate but that it has to be pretty close to.

 

I think I will continue to go down my Visual Basic route for now, spent quite a lot of yesterday trying things out with not a great deal of progress to the ultimate goal but learnt a fair amount. I'm cautious of trying too many things and not getting far with anything and this taking longer than if I just try and stick at VB.