pywinauto 
(c) Mark Mc Mahon 2006 
Released under the LGPL licence


What is it
----------
pywinauto is a set of python modules to automate the Microsoft Windows GUI. 
At it's simplest it allows you to send mouse and keyboard actions to windows 
dialogs and controls.


Installation
------------
 - Unzip the pywinauto zip file to a folder.
 - Install the following Python packages
 
    - ctypes       http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/ctypes/
    - Sendkeys     http://www.rutherfurd.net/python/sendkeys/index.html
    - *Optional* PIL          http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/index.htm
    - *Optional* elementtree  http://effbot.org/downloads/

To check you have it installed correctly
Run Python ::

  >>> import application
  >>> app = application.Application()._start("notepad")
  >>> app.notepad.TypeKeys("%FX") 


Where to start
--------------
Look at the examples provided in test_application.py
There are examples in there to work with Notepad and MSPaint.


How does it work
----------------
A lot is done through attribute access (__getattr__) for each class. For example
when you get the attribute of an Application or Dialog object it looks for a 
dialog or control (respectively).

::

 myapp.Notepad # looks for a Window/Dialog of your app that has a title 'similar'
              # to "Notepad"
              
 myapp.PageSetup.OK # looks first for a dialog with a title like "PageSetup"
                   # then it looks for a control on that dialog with a title
                   # like "OK"
                   
This attribute resolution is delayed (currently a hard coded amount of time) until
it succeeds. So for example if you Select a menu option and then look for the
resulting dialog e.g. ::

  app.Notepad.MenuSelect("File->SaveAs")
  app.SaveAs.ComboBox5.Select("UTF-8")
  app.SaveAs.edit1.SetText("Example-utf8.txt")
  app.SaveAs.Save.Click()
 
At the 2nd line the SaveAs dialog might not be open by the time this line is
executed. So what happens is that we wait until we have a control to resolve 
before resolving the dialog. At that point if we can't find a SaveAs dialog with
a ComboBox5 control then we wait a very short period of time and try again, 
this is repeated up to a maximum time (currently 1 second!)

This avoid the user having to use time.sleep or a "WaitForDialog" function.


Some similar tools for comparison
---------------------------------
 * Python tools

    - Watsup
    - winGuiAuto

 * Other scripting language tools

    - Perl Win32::GuiTest
    - Ruby GuiTest
    - others?

 * Other free tools

    - AutoIt
    - See collection at: 

 * Commercial tools

    - WinRunner
    - SilkTest
    - Visual Test
    - Many Others

    
Why write yet another automation tool if there are so many out there?
---------------------------------------------------------------------
There are loads of reasons :-)

*Takes a different approach*
Most other tools are not object oriented you end  up writing stuff like::

    window = findwindow(title = "Untitled - Notepad", class = "Notepad")
    SendKeys(window, "%OF")  # Format -> Font
    fontdialog  = findwindow("title = "Font")
    buttonClick(fontdialog, "OK")
    
I was hoping to create something more userfriendly (and pythonic). For example
the translation of above would be::
    
    win = app.UntitledNotepad
    win.MenuSelect("Format->Font")
    app.Font.OK.Click()

*Python makes it easy*
Python is a great programming language, but I didn't find
any automation tools that were Pythonic (I only found one
that was implemented in python) and I didn't care for it 
too much.

*Localization as a main requirement*
I work in the localization industry and GUI
automation is used extensively as often all
you need to do is ensure that your UI behaves
and is correct with respect to the Source
UI. This is actually an easier job then for
testing the original source UI.

But most automation tools are based off of coordinates or text of the 
controls and these can change in the localized software. So my goal (
though not yet implemented) is to allow scripts to run unchanged
between original source language (often English) and the translated
software (Japanese, German, etc).