UIAutomation won't retrieve children of an element

Question

I can see that an element with specific Automation ID has children in the Inspect tool:

But when I try to retrieve them like this:

AutomationElement aPane = mainWindow.FindFirst(TreeScope.Subtree, new PropertyCondition(AutomationElement.AutomationIdProperty, "8264"));
AutomationElementCollection theChildren = aPane.FindAll(TreeScope.Subtree, Condition.TrueCondition);

The aPane element is retrieved correctly, but theChildren element is empty. Any ideas what went wrong?

Answer 1

Actually the problem is that Inspect.exe is written in unmanaged code while I was trying to achieve the same results in managed code. Unmanaged code returns slightly different results than the managed version (e. g. manged code would return control type document where the unmanaged code would return edit in my application).

While it took me some time to understand it, unmanaged code is much faster, more accurate and therefore more reliable.

Some examples of unmanaged UI automation code for C# can be found in the Microsoft Windows UI Automation Blog e. g. here,