How to control MFC application from another program?

Question

I have a binary application on windows (train timetable software) which contains a lot of interresting data which I need for my project (nothing illegal, just some weird optimization algorithm). But the application has no api and the data files have undocumented binary form.

So my idea is to control the application from my own code. I would like to send keystrokes to it to fill a form, run query and save result to a file (there are buttons and menu items for this in the app). And repeat many times.

Is there a library for this? Or an example? I have a general idea how to do it, but I am lazy and I do not want to invent the wheel.

Also, the same data is available on the web. Is there some solution for the same task with ASP (Win forms) web applications? I could probably handle parsing the results but I do not know how to fill the values of webforms controls.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can use simple Win32 APIs to do this.

FindWindowEx and then once you have the window handle you can send any message (such as WM_KEYDOWN) to it by using SendMessage.

A good tool which helps with this process is Spy++ because it allows you to see the window hierarchy more easily and also which messages are being used internally for the application you are monitoring.

As for web form controls, you will probably have to do more work than this because typically the web will be one canvas control that things are drawn custom onto depending on the browser. Perhaps doing this via some kind of proxy is a better approach where you actually filter the HTML pages.