Home Automation AutoHotKey Archive by category "COM" (Page 29)

Category: COM

COM (Microsoft’s Component Object Model)
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms694363(v=vs.85).aspx

select multiple items on a form (in mass)

AutoHotkey Merchandise-White Stress ball

In order to speed-up our page load times I like to archive items to an old folder.  Unfortunately there is no easy way to select some, but not all, items.   What I really wanted to do is automate select multiple items from a list.

Web scraping with AutoHotKey to the rescue!!! This simple looper is fast, flexible and a life saver. It simply sends tabs and the space key to my browser window saving me a lot of time and mundane work.  Below is the AutoHotKey code which is set to work in Chrome

 
WinActivate, ahk_class Chrome_WidgetWin_1 ;activate chrome window- lightning fast compared to IE
Loop, 25
{
Send, {Tab 2} ;sends two tabs
	sleep, 5
Send, {Space} ;selects / deselects item
}
return

And here is a video in case you’re not getting the value.

Select multiple items from a list

A black AutoHotkey branded water bottle on a desk beside a laptop, with a person reading a newspaper in the background

When your IT department fails you Web Scraping with AutoHotkey can save the day!

web scraping with AutoHotkey

One of my clients has over 3,000 videos on their website.  Amazingly nobody in their IT department can provide a holistic file with metadata like: Title, # of views, Length, Format, Tags, etc.  How crazy is that?   After contacting their video hosting company, nobody could (would) share this information!

Web Scraping with AutoHotkey to the rescue!

I wrote web scraping with AutoHotKey script that first got a list of all the videos, then looped over them and extracted various attributes about each video.  Not an ideal way to get this, but the client was manually going to go through this by cutting & pasting from their browse.

Web Scraping with AutoHotKey 103-Leveraging the Document Object Model

Web Scraping with AutoHotKey

Web Scraping with AutoHotKey-Leveraging the Document Object Model

This third video on Web Scraping gets a little advanced and shows how you can leverage the DOM to make extracting data from a webpage much easier and reliable.

Leveraging the Document Object Model (DOM)will take some practice (especially if you’re not familiar with Object oriented coding) but it is well worth it because it greatly reduces the amount of clean-up you have to do after you extract your data.  I used to write some pretty crazy regular expressions to try and clean up my code.  Once I learned how to better navigate the DOM it negated the need for cleaning!

The HTML Document Object Model (DOM)-Tree of Objects

Document Object Model

Video Web Scraping with AutoHotKey Leveraging the DOM plus looping over pages

The syntax for writing the writing the web scraping code can be found on my first post here.  There is also an AutoHotKey forum thread you might wish to review here.