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Wednesday 27 April 2011

Ruby: retrieve OLE object from HWND

I continue investigating the possibility to create custom auto-clicker. This time it's for my current project, so there'll be no blackjack. But anyway, the problems still appear and I have to resolve them. Just like this time when I've got the way to find Win32 windows by their specific attributes. Ruby contains magic gems like:
  • win32-api
  • windows-api
With their help I can easily get an access to Win32 API functions and call them from Ruby. But it works up to the moment when you encounter windows of Internet Explorer_Server class. Their children are HTML elements and they're not accessible directly via API. It's not a problem if we talk about browser. We can use Selenium or Watir to do all we need. But what if we talk about embeded Internet Explorer_Server windows which are placed on non-browser window? One of the ways is to get an access to corresponsing OLE object and hit it's properties and methods. Oh, good idea. But the main question is: how? All we know is just and HWND of this window. There's nothing impossible and this problem has the solution as well.