UI automation with another application

Question

I need to interact with a windows application by clicking a button in my application. More precisely: how can I write in a textbox or scroll a dropdown menu?

Answer 1

There are multiple ways to do this depending on what kind of application you are automating. If you are automating a WPF application I would suggesting using Microsoft UI Automation (UIA). There are some nice wrappers written around UIA like TestStack.White and FlaUI . FlaUI is the more modern of the two and supports UIAv3 using a COM wrapper. TestStack.White is built on top of a UIAv2 using the managed wrapper in the .NET Framework which is no longer supported.

If you are automating anything else besides a WPF application you can do straight PInvokes to SendMessage . I would suggest staying away from that method and using the Microsoft UIA framework since sending windows messages can get quite verbose. If you really want to go with the Win32 route I suggest using something like AutoIT to automate your application.

Lastly, you will want to download the Windows SDK and run Inspect.exe from that. Inspect.exe is the application that will allow you to see the properties you are attempting to query and the patterns that are available. Applications like AutoIT have essentially built their own Inspect.exe or reference and application call UISpy which is also in the Windows SDK but mostly superseded by Inspect.exe .