Setting the foreground window

Ever found it annoying when you start an application that takes a long time to start up , start working on other things and the application decides to popup and annoy you after/while it starts up?

Well you can now do the same with pywinauto :-)

I had tried to get this right before and hadn't succeeded - but I managed it today. HwndWrapper.SetFocus will now make the window the foreground window - even if it is not the current foreground window.

This was easy enough really - and I had thought that I had tried this already - but obviously hadn't :-(

Here is the new SetFocus method...

    def SetFocus(self):
      """Set the focus to this control

      Activate the window if necessary"""

      # find the current foreground window
      cur_foreground = win32functions.GetForegroundWindow()

      # if it is already foreground then just return
      if self.handle != cur_foreground:

          # get the thread of the window that is in the foreground
          cur_fore_thread = win32functions.GetWindowThreadProcessId(
              cur_foreground, 0)

          # get the thread of the window that we want to be in the foreground
          control_thread = win32functions.GetWindowThreadProcessId(self, 0)

          # if a different thread owns the active window
          if cur_fore_thread != control_thread:
              # Attach the two threads and set the foreground window
              win32functions.AttachThreadInput(
                  cur_fore_thread, control_thread, True)

              win32functions.SetForegroundWindow(self)

              # detach the thread again
              win32functions.AttachThreadInput(
                  cur_fore_thread, control_thread, False)

          else:   # same threads - just set the foreground window
              win32functions.SetForegroundWindow(self)

          # make sure that we are idle before returning
          win32functions.WaitGuiThreadIdle(self)

          # only sleep if we had to change something!
          time.sleep(.06)

      return self

And here is a short bit of code you can test it with

from pywinauto.application import Application
import time

app = Application.start("Notepad.exe")
app.UntitledNotepad.MenuSelect("Format->Font")

for i in range(4):
  time.sleep(2)
  app.Font.Edit1.SetFocus()

If you run that code and work with other windows - then the Notepad Font dialog will popup (annoyingly :-) ) every 2 seconds.

All is left now is to add a call to this method in those other methods that REQUIRE the window to have focus (TypeKeys() for sure, maybe the ...Input() methods - but they probably require a WindowFromPoint/RealChildWindowFromPoint/ChildWindowFromPoint call first to ensure it's necessary).

(all happy with myself for getting that off the todo list - except it wasn't on the todo list :-D )