Question

This old stackoverflow post is asking pretty much the same question that I have, however using Spy++ I have obtained the controls handle ID. Now what? 🙂

I am not sure what this process is called where I can obtain the contents of another applications control from a .net application, therefore I am not having much success with results on the old google machine.

I have an MFC application with a listbox that contains data I need to automate a task using a WPF C# application. I would prefer not to use an external lib and don’t think it would be too labour intensive once I have found the process and have my C# app take visibility of the respective list control to do what I need.

Can anyone please point me in the right direction as to what I should be looking up or provide some code to get me started. At this point I’m stuck and my little project relies pretty heavily on this. I don’t want to use an OCR either.

Thanks,

Ash

Answer 1

To get text from Win32 ListBox control you have to use messages and functions specially for that control, here is a reference :

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff485971%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

In your case you should first see how many items are in the listbox with LB_GETCOUNT, and then for each item get text with LB_GETTEXT.

Here is the method that will return items in a list, parameter is ListBox control window handle :

[DllImport("user32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = false)]
static extern IntPtr SendMessage(IntPtr hWnd, uint Msg, IntPtr wParam, StringBuilder lParam); 
const int LB_GETCOUNT = 0x018B;
const int LB_GETTEXT = 0x0189;

private List<string> GetListBoxContents(IntPtr listBoxHwnd)
{
  int cnt = (int)SendMessage(listBoxHwnd, LB_GETCOUNT, IntPtr.Zero, null);
  List<string> listBoxContent = new List<string>();
  for (int i = 0; i < cnt; i++)
  {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(256);
    IntPtr getText = SendMessage(listBoxHwnd, LB_GETTEXT, (IntPtr)i, sb);
    listBoxContent.Add(sb.ToString());
  }
  return listBoxContent;
}