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I am using the pywinauto module in python (3.7.4) on Microsoft Windows to automate a window on desktop. I need to make various functionalities to perform tasks on a window opened on the desktop like getting a window, focus on a window , maximize and minimize, close a window,move and resize window or check if the window is active or not. Following is my code

from pywinauto import application
import time

app=application.Application()
app.start('Notepad.exe')
time.sleep(5)
app1 = app.top_window()

this is the basic code to open any application and then I need to make other tasks on separate scripts as user inputs.

The following is to focus on the window ,maximize or minimize or close the window application or resize a window

app1.set_focus()
time.sleep(2)
app1.maximize()
time.sleep(2)
app1.minimize()
app1.close()
app.Notepad.move_window(0,0,1280,700)

I need to work on more functionalities but can't seem to understand what to do

  1. How do I check if a window is active or not(state of the window)
  2. How do I get all the current windows opened on the desktop
  3. I am using move_window to resize the window , keeping x and y coordinates as 0 but how do I keep the size of the window same and just move it by the x and y coordinates
  4. And I am using app.start() to run an application but if I need to run an already existing excel file or a pdf file so do I need to put the executable paths of excel or adobe as well as the path of the file I need to open and if yes how do I perform that
  • I used Pywinauto back in the days with Python 2.5.4, but it took a while until it had Py 3 support. In the time I switched to Py 3 i learned to use the pywin32 libraries, for which I know how to do these things. Would another lib be an option? If not, someone with a bit more knowledge of Pywinauto for Py 3 should answer, but if you are able to use another lib, these points are simple two-liners each. – Grimmauld Apr 14 '20 at 07:40
  • @S.Bender Though I have been asked to use pywinauto module but any other module which might be more flexible might help me as a backup option so could you please share your knowledge of pywin32 module with me to perform the above. –  Apr 14 '20 at 09:04

1 Answers1

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As i am more familiar with pywin32, this is a way of doing above things with pywin32. These code examples assume you know the hwnd of the window you want to test

1) Window active check test_hwnd == win32gui.GetForegroundWindow() will give you the boolean whether or not that is the foreground window (my understanding of active)

2) List of all windows (saved to a dict {hwnd:title}) (modified version of How to get a list of the name of every open window?)

def get_all_windows():
    windows_by_hwnd = {}

    def winEnumHandler(hwnd, ctx):
        title = win32gui.GetWindowText(hwnd)
        if win32gui.IsWindowVisible(hwnd) and title:
            windows_by_hwnd[hwnd] = title
    win32gui.EnumWindows( winEnumHandler, None )
    return windows_by_hwnd

3)

def move_by_offset(hwnd, x, y):
    rect = win32gui.GetWindowRect(hwnd)
    win32gui.MoveWindow(hwnd, rect[0]+x, rect[1]+y, rect[2]+x, rect[3]+y, True)

def move_to(hwnd, x, y):
    rect = win32gui.GetWindowRect(hwnd)
    win32gui.MoveWindow(hwnd, x, y, rect[2]-rect[0], rect[3]-rect[1], True)

4) I suggest using one of the many Python command line interfaces to do the windows "open with..." Something like os.system("c:/path/to/exe.exe c:/path/to/file.ending") And you are better of using subprocess here as it has better error handling than os, but there are enough answers on Stackoverflow about how to use subprocess. You will probably end up with something like subprocess.call("c:/path/to/exe.exe c:/path/to/file.ending", shell=True), but as i am not very familiar with subprocess, this is nothing i can say for sure is a good way of doing this.

I hope this hepls you.

Grimmauld
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