On Thu, Dec 24, 2015 at 5:38 PM, Alan Gauld <alan.ga...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> To quote my recent book: [...] > This is a frustrating technique that is very error prone and also very > vulnerable to changes in the application being controlled—for example, > if an upgrade changes the screen layout, your code will likely break. > Because of the difficulty of writing the code, as well as the fragility > of the solution, you should avoid this unless every other possibility > has failed. After reading the docs on PyAutoGUI 0.9.31, I've been playing around with it and investigating some of these "fragilities". If I decide to go this route it appears that I need to have the main window I'd be working with maximized to full screen. Otherwise, any coordinates to position the mouse cursor could very well be incorrect. It would be better to use any and all keyboard shortcuts available in the application I'm working with, as these should have reproducible behavior. Trying to use the package's image location functions for "commonly" named buttons (such as "OK" or "Cancel") could easily be iffy since it searches the entire monitor screen, which might trigger the wrong button. However, PyAutoGUI does have a region-defining tool that can limit the area of screen real estate being searched. Since I don't have a dual-monitor setup at home, I cannot test what would happen in that situation. I notice that multiple monitors is on the package author's TODO list. Etc. Definitely not software nirvana here! I've been trying to think of what things I can abstract out of the possible different environments. The only thing that has occurred to me so far is do my mapping of a given software application window in terms of relative coordinates. This way I can detect the current monitor viewing size and then compute the needed absolute mouse coordinates. > The other things to check are (On Windows): > > 1) File export/import (CSV, JSON or XML maybe? or a Windows app > such as Word/Excel?)) On one of the software packages I work with every day, there are limited text file exports. Unfortunately, they don't contain all of the information I need, though they do contain most of it. > 2) COM object model access via PyWin32 I used to have a very little bit of COM knowledge, but that has long since been forgotten. I don't know now what possibilities that might open up for me in accessing one of these commercial applications. > 3) A C DLL exposed via ctypes Oscar very briefly mentioned taking this type of approach once upon a time. This is also something I currently know little about and don't know what possibilities it might give me. > 4) A Web front end or web service This is a total no go for the software I use at work. > If you really must go down the screen scraping robotics route and > you are thinking of upgrading to Windows 10 make sure you do that > first or you will almost certainly have to rewrite from scratch > (and after most every other upgrade of OS or app thereafter). > And don't even think of changing your system fonts - ever! > I am at the mercy of my IS department re possible upgrades and they often don't give notice of coming upgrades! Thanks, Alan! Merry Christmas! boB _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
