Thread: Effecting outside programs (such as IE)

How in C++ can you make a program that effects an outside sources, in this case my browser's address bar. What I'm looking for it to do is punch in an address which contains dates at the end and the program will cycle through all the dates and every 5 seconds update the browser at the next page.

(by effects outside sources I mean it can type in data into another program)

Note: If you post any code, please assume namespace std

Perhaps you could use shellexecute() to get the browser to display a page at a time.

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Mats

So make a search in google for "ShellExecute MSDN", and see if that helps.

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Mats

That didn't help much, 5 pages of google got me nowhere, most of its help to other people and what is in tutorial form either goes way over my head or doesn't cover anything near what I want. It covers how to open files and close them and open find dialogues, but nowhere do I see how to output text into another program.

I learn best by example, preferably with an explanation of what things are in the example.

For the record: I am a begginner, and this is probably way out of my league, but I need it for a program that will greatly help with my everyday life. I havn't learned much farther than classes and vectors/maps/matrixes, and I don't program especially often.

Sounds like a job for javascript.

Todd

So, my suggestion was to actually NOT control what IE/Firefox/Opera or whatever other browser you like to use, but instead start a new one each time. This resolves the major headache of explaining to you, somehting that I with 20 years of programming experience would find a daunting task, and I doubt that you would understand after less than 50 posts. I don't actually know the EXACT answer, but the process of communicating with another application would involve finding the ID of the window of the browser, then sending the right messages to simulate that the user presses various buttons, moves the mouse around and such things. It is not a "quick 15 lines of code", but rather a major undertaking.

Hence I suggested something that I think you would be capable of doing - much like someone asking "How do I build a Formula 1 racing car" with no car-building experience would probably be told to try to build a slightly less advanced form of car, such as a go-cart, first, before attempting something quite advanced.

If you actually want to do what you suggest, I propose that you search the web for applications that are capable of doing "application control" for test/Q&A purpose and such. There are scripting applications that are capable of doing automated operations of other applications, and this would be the right solution if you are a beginner. Of course, these are probably not free [but you can't have everything ].

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Mats

Ahhh now I see what you're getting at, OK, I figured out how to open a window:

ShellExecute(NULL, "open", "www.google.com", "", "", SW_SHOW);

Now how do I close it?

turck: this could be a good time for you to learn about libraries, I would look into libcurl if you are feeling adventurous.

Closing it you would need to get the process handle and tell windows to close it, never done it before though.

I'm looking around the web and It seems like create process has some sort of difference that allows you to close it later with CloseHandle.. im looking into this now.

sendmessage() wm_quit wm_close

3 things I found while googling, good luck !

Avoid create process. Windows API is a pain.
Use ShellExecute like you've done to open the window.
You can use FindWindow to find the actual window later and send WM_CLOSE through SendMessage.
Alternatively, you can use ShellExecuteEx, which can be a pain to get working right, and thus have it give you a handle to the process it starts. Then you could enumerate windows. And get the process's main window (somehow I think). And close the process (TerminateProcess), and so on.

Complicated.