We usually know where we are with common controls – ones that belong to Windows, but custom controls in third party software may not follow the same rules. But other objects don’t necessarily work the same way.

In the case of standard Buttons, Edits, Windows and Checkboxes the published text is usually what you see. One is that the “caption text” that the object publishes is not always the text that you see on the screen.

There are a number of shortfalls to this approach. This is what GetObjectText and GetWindowText do. And so we get the text of the control back. If we know its handle we can send a message to it saying “please give me your text”. A handle allows us to interact with the control. Note that I use the term window interchangeably with object or control here – the controls that appear in the list are “windowed controls” – they have window handles. Macro Scheduler enumerates all top level windows and then for each one enumerates each of its child “windows”. That is what Macro Scheduler is doing when it builds this list of windows and objects. An app can simply ask the control for its text by sending a simple message to it. This caption text belonging to an object is made available to other processes – it is published if you will. Each line gives us the current handle of the object, followed by its class name and then its caption text, if any. In the above screen shot the highlighted line is showing us an object of class “Button” with caption “Test Center”. What we are looking at is a tree representation of windows open on the system. You’ll end up with a window that looks something like this: Open up Macro Scheduler and click on the Tools menu and then the “View System Windows” option. In this post I aim to explain what kinds of text can be captured with these new commands and why there will always be some text that cannot be retrieved.įirst let’s look at how the existing functions, GetWindowText and GetObjectText work in Macro Scheduler 9.x and below. As I have mentioned previously, Macro Scheduler 10 introduces some powerful new commands for capturing screen text.

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