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. Note: These examples currently only work on English. 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