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Click buttons using AutomationID in AutoIT

I am automating a VB6 application using AutoIT and have hit some issues.

The application has a 'Toolboxes' window which contains an SSTab control with 18 tabs in 6 rows. There are over 100 instances of the ThunderRT6CommandButton class. My AutoIT script is supposed to interact with specific buttons, and so far I've been using ControlClick:

ControlClick($sToolboxes, '', '[CLASS:ThunderRT6CommandButton; INSTANCE:81]')

The issue is that when I change to a different tab and close the toolboxes window the application remembers which tab was open. This means that the next time I open the toolboxes window the tabs are initiated in a different order and all of the instance numbers of the buttons have changed. I can't even call ControlClick and specify the text of the button to be clicked because that isn't unique; about 20 of the buttons are simply labelled 'Apply'.

Using Inspect.exe I noticed that each button has a unique AutomationID which is constant even when closing and reopening the toolboxes window after shuffling the tabs around.

Is there any way that I can click buttons using their AutomationID in AutoIT?

The only other fix for this that I can think of is making the AutoIT script launch the application itself so that the toolboxes are in the same order each time the script runs

Solution

  • The AutoIT Window Info tool shows the AutomationID, but calls it "ID":

    I changed my script to include ID:## instead of an instance number and it works:

    ControlClick($sToolboxes, '', '[CLASS:ThunderRT6CommandButton; ID:245]')