Thanks Michael for the additional info. Evidently I was getting off-track with "owner drawn" controls. Just so you understand what I was saying: I have made a listbox speak, through scripting, in the MS Word VBA IDE. it has a .type property of listbox, however, the .text property of the control never returns anything. so, if it were a windowless control, at this level, would it have a .type property of listbox? is that something window eyes is setting for us scripters, or is what I'm dealing with a regular listbox? And if it's a regular listbox, shouldn't the .text property then work? thanks. Chip
_____ From: Michael D. Lawler [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 11:22 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: to GW; was Text from a Menu Chip just so you know Word doesn't use owner drawn listboxes it uses windowless controls and you can only use MSAA to communicate with them. You can see this by looking at the class and type of the windows in question. WE tells users these controls are buttons, listboxes, checkboxes, because they look and work like them, but when you get to the scripting level they are completely different animals. At 11:16 AM 12/16/2009, you wrote: thanks again Doug. this gives me an idea for a script though: I'll take the techniques I've developed in the ms office script, where I'm able to read an owner-drawn listbox and find the highlighted item, and turn them into a script which monitors for any such listbox, and speaks them when they're the active control. I know it won't help the ones which are graphic in nature, but it may help in some situations. Chip _____ From: Doug Geoffray [ <mailto:[email protected]> mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 9:08 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: to GW; was Text from a Menu Chip, No problem. But just to be clear, owner drawn means the owner of the control is responsible for displaying the contents of the listbox. Normally when you use a listbox you simply give the listbox all the data and the listbox itself is responsible for putting up the items that we see. Given this it is easy to query the listbox directly to get the text of any item. But if the listbox is owner drawn then it tell the owner that it needs to display the contents. So the control itself doesn't have a clue of what is displayed. Typically owner drawn is used if you want to display something like a graphic or something more visually appealing then just standard looking text. Regards, Doug Chip Orange wrote: Hi Doug, I guess I don't understand what "owner drawn" means; I thought it meant non-window eyes listboxes. I see now it's something else, so sorry for the confusion. Chip _____ From: Doug Geoffray [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 8:25 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: to GW; was Text from a Menu Chip, As you mentioned, it worked for other listboxes. So as long as the listbox is not owner drawn then the text field works. It doesn't make sense to remove the text property just because owner drawn listboxes don't work when all non-owner drawn work great. Regards, Doug Chip Orange wrote: ok, thanks Michael, I'll go test msaa again, as it too wasn't giving me the selected text back when I wrote this project. if this feature doesn't work, why then is the "text" property for the listbox control in the object model? thanks. Chip _____ From: Michael D. Lawler [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, December 14, 2009 12:03 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: to GW; was Text from a Menu This is as good as it gets short of using MSAA as you can't get text via Win32 for owner drawn list boxes and in the case of Word they are not using Win32 controls so you have to use MSAA. At 06:22 PM 12/12/2009, you wrote: ok, I decided to write my own test script rather than send GW into the archives. I thought I remembered they had fixed it, but my test script shows it's mostly fixed, but there are places I found, such as listboxes put up by MSWord, where the text of the selected item was always empty. you could get the number of the selected item, and I guess that's something, but you could not get text of any item. in other places, such as the listbox displayed by WE for the systray apps, it was able to tell me the text of the selected item. sorry for the sidetrack. Chip _____ From: Chip Orange [ mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, December 12, 2009 12:45 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: to GW; was Text from a Menu thanks Jeff. I appreciate the example of how to create a listbox. my problems in the past though, and my question, was related to listboxes which were created by other applications. I would get pointers to them via the window structures, or via msaa info and the accessible structures, and neither one would properly indicate which item was the selected item, even when an msaa event came through for a selection having been made. My conversations with Aaron at the time indicated GW knew about the problem, so I was wondering if they knew if it had been fixed. thanks. Chip _____ From: Jeff Weiss [ mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, December 11, 2009 9:35 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: to GW; was Text from a Menu I know that identifying a simple listBox item was fixed with an earlier version of the toolkit. This example from the manual does work: ' This example creates a simple dialog with a sorted list box of three items, ' along with custom default ' and cancel buttons, and returns a string of the ' data associated with the selected item. Dim myHotkey : Set myHotkey = Keyboard.RegisterHotkey("Alt-Control-Shift-I","DisplayListBox") Function DisplayListBox() Set myListBox = SharedObjects("com.GWMicro.GwToolkit.SimpleDialogs", 90000).ListBoxDialog myListBox.AddItem "Red", "Red" myListBox.AddItem "Green", "Green" myListBox.AddItem "Blue", "Blue" myListBox.Sort = True myListBox.DefaultButton = "&Ok" myListBox.CancelButton = "Close" Dim returnValue : returnValue = myListBox.ChooseItem("Select a color") Sleep 3000 Speak ReturnValue Sleep 2000 ' If the green item was selected with the OK button, ' speak would announce, "Green." End Function This may not be the problem you are considering, but I know this one was fixed. Jeff Weiss From: Chip Orange [ mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2009 7:23 PM To: [email protected] Subject: to GW; was Text from a Menu Hello GW, this reminds me: some versions back I was trying to do this kind of thing to see which choice of a listbox was the selected one, and this wasn't working, and was confirmed as a bug in WE. I think it wasn't working in either the listbox control structure or the accessible info. Can you tell me if seeing which choice is the selected one in a listbox is now possible? thanks. Chip _____ From: Stephen Clower [ mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, December 09, 2009 10:31 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Text from a Menu J.J., If you're looking at the menu through MSAA, you might test for something like: Set accObj = FocusedWindow.Accessible ' Assuming the focused window is a menu, set the accObj variable to hold the Accessible representation of the focused item. If accObj.State = state_SYSTEM_CHECKED Then ' item is checked. Else ' It isn't. End If Hope this helps. Steve On 12/9/2009 10:22 PM, J.J. Meddaugh wrote: Hello. I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction of how to obtain the state of a checkbox that's inside of a standard application menu? I was looking all over the script manual, but apparently not hard enough. Thanks. J.J. Meddaugh - ATGuys.com A premier Licensed Code Factory and KNFB Reader distributor -- Michael D. Lawler Voice 260-489-3671 Fax 260-489-2608 Internet mailto:[email protected] web http://www.gwmicro.com <http://www.gwmicro.com/> ftp ftp://ftp.gwmicro.com <ftp://ftp.gwmicro.com/> GW Micro, Inc., Development Liaison and Technical Support Supervisor -- Michael D. Lawler Voice 260-489-3671 Fax 260-489-2608 Internet mailto:[email protected] web http://www.gwmicro.com <http://www.gwmicro.com/> ftp ftp://ftp.gwmicro.com <ftp://ftp.gwmicro.com/> GW Micro, Inc., Development Liaison and Technical Support Supervisor
