c# FlaUi get all the Values from DataGridView of another program

Question

I'm trying to pull all the values from another program's DataGridBox. For that I'm using FlaUi. I made a code that does what I want. However, it is very slow. Is there a faster way to pull up all the values from another program's DataGridView using FlaUi?

my code:

var desktop = automation.GetDesktop();
                var window = desktop.FindFirstDescendant(cf => cf.ByName("History:  NEWLIFE")).AsWindow();
                var table = window.FindFirstDescendant(cf => cf.ByName("DataGridView")).AsDataGridView();

                int rowscount = (table.FindAllChildren(cf => cf.ByProcessId(30572)).Length) - 2;
                // Remove the last row if we have the "add" row

                for (int i = 0; i < rowscount; i++)
                {
                    string string1 = "Row " + i;
                    string string2 = "Symbol Row " + i;

                    var RowX = table.FindFirstDescendant(cf => cf.ByName(string1));
                    var SymbolRowX = RowX.FindFirstDescendant(cf => cf.ByName(string2));
                    SCAN.Add("" + SymbolRowX.Patterns.LegacyIAccessible.Pattern.Value);                    
                }

                var message = string.Join(Environment.NewLine, SCAN);
                MessageBox.Show(message);

Thank you in-advance

Answer 1

Searching for descendants is pretty slow as it will go thru all objects in the tree until it finds the desired control (or there are no controls left). It might be much faster to use the grid pattern to find the desired cells or get all rows at once and loop thru them.

Alternatively you could try caching as UIA uses inter process calls which are generally slow. So each Find method or value property does such a call. If you have a large grid, that can sum up pretty badly. For that exact case, using UIA Caching could make sense. For that, you would get everything you need (all descendants of the table and the LegacyIAccessible pattern) in one go inside a cache request and then loop thru those elements in the code with CachedChildren and such. A simple example for this can be found at the FlaUI wiki at https://github.com/FlaUI/FlaUI/wiki/Caching :

var grid = <FindGrid>.AsGrid();
var cacheRequest = new CacheRequest();
cacheRequest.TreeScope = TreeScope.Descendants;
cacheRequest.Add(Automation.PropertyLibrary.Element.Name);
using (cacheRequest.Activate())
{
    var rows = _grid.Rows;
    foreach (var row in rows)
    {
        foreach (var cell in row.CachedChildren)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(cell.Name);
        }
    }
}