Do you think most apps provide some interface in one way or another, especially major apps (e.g. MS Office apps, Adobe apps)?
It's ok if we do this on an app-to-app basis, but for each app, how easy is it do you think will it take to determine the interface for them? Thanks for a very informative answer! On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 4:35 AM, Tim Roberts <t...@probo.com> wrote: > Marte Soliza wrote: > > > > I'm looking for a way to, first, determine the current active > > application (i.e. the one with the top-most window). I think I got > > this now, but I'm not sure how much of this will help in my final goal > > which is to get the path of the current open document (for those that > > have them). > > > > I believe there is no single way to do this that will work for all > > applications, but is there a way to do this for most applications? Is > > there some convention that most applications follow to define what > > their current document is? > > > > If there's no general way, I'm willing to do this on an app-to-app > > basis starting with, say, MS Word. > > This is an extremely difficult problem with no general case solutions. > > I worked on a multi-year project for A Major Processor Manufacturer a > few years ago that tried to do this, in an attempt to create an > immersive, collaborative team environment. They wanted to tell whether > several people were working on the same document. We were able to > support Office and Internet Explorer, but that was pretty much it, and > even that was quite delicate. It didn't always work, and it failed > after virtually every Office upgrade. That's why the product has never > gone public. > > One huge problem is that Windows, in general, does not have the concept > of a "document". Some applications have a document-centric architecture > (although many do not), but there are no Win32 APIs about documents. > The Office applications can be controlled by COM, but then you need to > map from a window handle to a COM object. > > Now, it turns out that last problem is solvable. The Office > applications all register themselves in the Running Object Table. It's > possible to enumerate the monikers in the Running Object Table and > figure out which one maps to a particular window handle. That gives you > the root application object, and you can ask that for the current > document, assuming the document has been saved. > > For IE, you can actually go probing through the window handles to find > the text box that contains the current URL. > > -- > Tim Roberts, t...@probo.com > Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc. > > _______________________________________________ > python-win32 mailing list > python-win32@python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-win32 >
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