Tag Archives: SelectionItemPattern

Daily automation: getting selected radio button

By Alexander Petrovskiy on | Leave a comment

This is truth, the phrase “only one who completely understood the topic can explain it to others” and “to put it so simply that even a five-year old guy would get it”. When I tried to write how to get an item that is selected, such as a radio button, I discovered that it’s not so easy as it should be. If a control containing items does not support SelectionPattern, there is a problem.
This fact led to creation of the Get-UIASelectedItem cmdlet.
To demonstrate how it works, let’s start calc.exe in the Programmer mode:

ipmo [path]\UIAutomation.dll
Start-Process calc -PassThru | Get-UIAWindow | Get-UIAMenuItem -Name View | Invoke-UIAMenuItemExpand | Get-UIAMenuItem -Name Programmer | Invoke-UIAMenuItemClick;

The calc window in this mode looks like:

CalcProgrammerMode001

There are two sets of radio buttons. Unfortunately, containers of these controls do nothing, as they don’t support SelectionPattern. It would be excellent if the following code worked:

# this code does not work
Start-Process calc -PassThru | Get-UIAWindow | Get-UIAImage -Name 'some name' | Get-UIAPaneSelection;

The problem is that none of two images supports SelectionPattern (and this is very atypical for an Image to support the most of the patterns).

This fact forces us to find out a solution using only those patterns that available to us. We know that radio buttons are likely to support SelectionItemPattern. Excellent! Let’s use this pattern.

We can group controls and get only those that are selected:

# this code does not work
Get-UIAImage -AutomationId 1080 | Get-UIARadioButton | Get-UIASelectedItem;

Why does this code not work? The answer is simple: images are not containers for radio buttons. Even though two groups of radio buttons work simultaneously, i.e. there can be selected two radio buttons, one for each image, we can’t rely on images. All radio buttons, by the opinion of MS UI Automation, are under the Pane that includes the most of controls.

Get-UIAPane;

CalcProgrammerMode002
What should we do to get the selected radio button on the upper image? We can group radio button manually and put them as an input to the Get-UIASelectedItem cmdlet:

"hex","dec","oct","bin" | %{ Get-UIARadioButton -Name $_; } | Get-UIASelectedItem | Read-UIAControlName
Posted in: Daily automation, PowerShell, UIAutomation module | Tagged: , ,

(MS) UIAutomation: all about a combo box

By Alexander Petrovskiy on | Leave a comment

Task: automate combo box selection.

Task #2: provide a homework helping to learn the control.

Requirements: describe both getting the selection and selecting list items.

Solution: below is the preparation (services.msc is already running, select a service, open the context menu, click Properties):

Get-UIAWindow -Name Services | `
Get-UIADataGrid | `
Get-UIADataItem -Name Alerter | `
Invoke-UIAControlContextMenu | `
Get-UIAMenuItem -Name Properties | `
Invoke-UIAMenuItemClick;

If you are sitting against a Windows 7 box, select for our test another service, for example, BranchCache.

Now the combo box can be seen. It has three or four values (I’m again doing the testing on a Windows XP box as I care about working on older and the newest operating systems): Automatic, Manual, and Disabled. There might or mightn’t be two ‘Automatic…’ items.

How to get what is selected now? Do so:

$((Get-UIAWindow -p mmc | Get-UIAComboBox | Get-UIAComboBoxSelection)[0]).Current

Now, is there a way to set a selection? Who roared ‘SetFocus; SendKeys’? Shut up, it’s not a sport but a torture. If a control is healthy and developers’ hands are sewn directly to shoulders, we can and we must use patterns.

Get-UIAWindow -p mmc | `
Get-UIAComboBox | `
Invoke-UIAComboBoxExpand | `
Get-UIAList | `
Get-UIAListItem -Name Automatic | `
Invoke-UIAListItemSelectItem -ItemName Automatic | `
Invoke-UIAListItemClick;

Too long? Let’s shortenize:

Get-UIAWindow -p mmc | `
Get-UIAComboBox | `
Invoke-UIAComboBoxExpand | `
Get-UIAListItem -Name Automatic | `
Invoke-UIAListItemSelectItem -ItemName Automatic | `
Invoke-UIAListItemClick;

We managed to delete only the Get-UIAList cmdlet. Why?
1) All the Get- cmdlets can perform search from the point they’ve been given with. Given a window, a childwindow or a control, from any of that start, a Get- cmdlet (excluding Get-UIAWindow as it does not have the -InputObject parameter) can continue the search down the Automation tree.
2) All the Invoke- (and pattern-cmdlets Get- and Set- like Get-UIAComboBoxSelection. Recognize them in a way: Get/Set-UIA[ControlType][Pattern name or abbreviation]) cmdlets can’t perform any search. They should be fed with a pipeline from a Get- cmdlet or a cmdlet that passed thru (-PassThru’ed) the object of the AutomationElement type.

To shortenize even more, you may cut out the first call, Get-UIAWindow (as it’s always stored in the [UIAutomation.CurrentData]::CurrentWindow variable), but be very attentively doing so: if you/your test Get-s a window (the main or an active child), closes it and tries to work with subsequent calls of Get-UIAWindow, error definitely will appear.

Homework: practisize working with the combo box, try another values, get the selection (I suppose that you know what is the difference between the selected list item and the selected list item that is braced inside the dotted box), save selection to a file, change selection, read it back from the file you’ve created, set the saved selection to the combo box, and do it until a new post got published. 🙂

Posted in: UI Automation, UIAutomation module | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , ,