Ghost in the Machine?

preid at reidit.co.uk preid at reidit.co.uk
Sun Dec 12 13:29:03 EST 2021


Thanks Alex, Dan & Tom for responding to this, but I suspect that I didn't explain things well enough, let me elaborate…

1. Periodically we have small batches of new members joining a club. We have their details in a CSV file which we'd normally think of doing some kind of batch upload.

2. However, the existing club membership system doesn't have a batch load facility only an on-screen form (such as the following) to be typed in:

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Surname:[.............]   Firstname(s):[...........]   Initials:[......]       |
|									          |	
|	Address:[.............]   Town:[.............]   Phone: [.............]   |
|	        [.............]   Postcode:[.........]   Mobile:[.............]   |
|										  |
|	Email:[....................]   GiftAid:[x]   Payment:(o)Bank  ( )Chq	  |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

3. We want a way to upload a group of new members by 'driving' the input fields, i.e. our app would click into each field, checkbox, radiobox and 'type' in the details.

4. We don't have access to the membership system's coding, it's one off the shelf. We just want do what we might have attempted some years ago, during the terminal/command line days! In those old days, we'd redirect the stdin, stdout, stderror.

So my query is really as follows:
a) is this kind of 'channel' redirection possible, can we send mouse clicks, type keys to enter text into fields etc?
b) has anyone done something like this? 
c) does anyone have any methods and/or code they can let me have for this?

My overview of what's required is as follows (assuming no show-stoppers):
- I make an overlay map, transparent everywhere except where there are input fields – this could be an actual map with "X"s over entry fields, spaces elsewhere, but might simply be a list of objects expressed as coordinate rectangles
- we take the name of a field, 'Surname' say, and lookup its location on the screen
- we position our virtual mouse to click into the location where the equivalent field can be found
- we enter its value as virtual keystrokes and click the 'tab' key to move to the next input object

Any idea whether this is possible and any code examples?!

Thanks.

Peter


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