Description Focuses (brings to the foreground/front) the specified Window on the system. Unlike the Focus action, Focus a Window Containing allows you to specify a text value for which to search the interior of the window. This is extremely useful when dealing with an application that has the same title bar caption across the application, but you only want to wait for a certain dialog box. The only way to distinguish the desired window sometimes to is to specify unique text in the dialog box or window such as a button or a label caption. This function searches top-level windows and ALL children windows.

Focus a Window Containing dialog

Parameters

Window Title
Specifies the title (caption) of the Window you wish to focus. The title of a window is located on the top left of the title bar of that window. For example, if Notepad is launched without a document, its caption is "Notepad - Untitled" (without the quotes).

For convenience, a drop down list of currently open Windows is available to quickly and accurately select the desired Window title.

Don't display hidden windows in the Windows Title Bar List
When checked this option causes the Window list to only display "visible" windows. When unchecked all window's that are open on the system are displayed - even "system windows" that you normally can't see. Unchecking this option is useful is you wish to select the main window of a system tray based application.

Window title must match exactly
Specified whether the Windows title entered is a partial title match or must match exactly. When unchecked, AutoMate will search for window titles that contain that text. This option is useful if you are dealing with a window title that may change depending on the document that is open -- for example: Microsoft Internet Explorer also displays the currently open web page. If you didn't care what page was open but you still wanted to specify the Internet Explorer window you would uncheck this option and enter "Microsoft Internet Explorer". If a window was found on the system with that text contained in the title it would be successful regardless of what comes before or after that text.

Text to find
Additional text in the window to search for such as label captions, button captions, ect. AutoMate's ability to locate specific text inside a window is highly dependant on the application and the controls it uses to display such text. The controls used by the application must respond back to the sytem when the text is requested by the system. Unfortuntely most "custom" and/or nonstandard controls do not do this. Usually the best way to find out if the Focus Window Containing action will work is to test it with your application.

Notes

Some window captions change depending on the content and actions of their application. In these cases it may be useful to use the "Window title must match exactly" option to only search for the text in the window title that remains constant (usually the program name excluding the document name).

Related Topics:

Focus a Window Action

Maximize a Window Action

Minimize a Window Action

Restore a Window action

Close a Window Action

Hide a Window Action

Unhide a Window Action

Other Available Actions