On 12/15/2010 8:43 AM, Doug Lee wrote:
Subject pretty much says it all: What order are the windows in the
Children and DirectChildren returned in? Possible orders I can think
of for DirectChildren would be Z order (same as with the WinAPI calls
for get next/previous window) and tab order. Children could be in
some sort of screen-based logical order, tab order, recursive Z order,
or depth-first or breadth-first tree order variants of those. Of
course, either could also be officially undefined, but I bet they're
not.
Officially, yes, the order is undefined.
Unofficially - which is to say, this is subject to change in any
version, so if you count on it you should verify it for each new version
of Window-Eyes - it's in reading order, left to right, top to bottom, by
the upper left corners of the windows.
As if that weren't useless enough, the "Children" tree is breadth-first,
mainly because that turns out to be marginally easier to implement
without recursion. (For breadth-first you just push the elements onto
the back of a queue. For depth-first you have to push them onto a stack,
but in reverse order. Whoever wrote this code - I think it was me -
apparently didn't want to mess with enumerating them in reverse order
for something that wasn't officially going to be documented anyway.)
By the way, Z order and tab order are the same thing. Strange but true.
