How to programmatically click a button in WPF?

Question

Since there's no button.PerformClick() in WPF, is there a way to click a wpf button programmatically?

Answer 1

One way to programmatically "click" the button, if you have access to the source, is to simply call the button's OnClick event handler (or Execute the ICommand associated with the button, if you're doing things in the more WPF-y manner).

Why are you doing this? Are you doing some sort of automated testing, for example, or trying to perform the same action that the button performs from a different section of code?

Answer 2

WPF takes a slighly different approach than WinForms here. Instead of having the automation of a object built into the API, they have a separate class for each object that is responsible for automating it. In this case you need the ButtonAutomationPeer to accomplish this task.

ButtonAutomationPeer peer =
  new ButtonAutomationPeer( someButton );
IInvokeProvider invokeProv =
  peer.GetPattern( PatternInterface.Invoke )
  as IInvokeProvider;
invokeProv.Invoke();

Here is a blog post on the subject: http://joshsmithonwpf.wordpress.com/2007/03/09/how-to-programmatically-click-a-button/

Answer 3

Like JaredPar said you can refer to Josh Smith's article towards Automation. However if you look through comments to his article you will find more elegant way of raising events against WPF controls

someButton.RaiseEvent(new RoutedEventArgs(Button.ClickEvent));

I personally prefer the one above instead of automation peers.

Answer 4

The RaiseEvent solution only raises the event. It does not execute the Command associated with the Button.