Find any window

Category:

System/API

Type:

Snippets

Difficulty:

Intermediate

Author:

DoWnloHo

Version Compatibility: Visual Basic 5

More information:

Sometimes you need to find a window using the API Call findwindow. If this window's caption changes, you can't find that same window all the time. With this function, you can find any window just by knowing a few letters in the caption. This will return the windows' hWnd. Also included is a function that will grab the window's caption. This is something that will be useful to a lot of programmers.

Instructions: Copy the declarations and code below and paste directly into your VB project.

Declarations:
Option Explicit Private Declare Function GetWindowText Lib "user32" _ Alias "GetWindowTextA" (ByVal hwnd As Long, ByVal lpString As _ String, ByVal cch As Long) As Long Private Declare Function GetWindowTextLength Lib "user32" _ Alias "GetWindowTextLengthA" (ByVal hwnd As Long) As Long Private Declare Function GetNextWindow Lib "user32" _ Alias "GetWindow" (ByVal hwnd As Long, ByVal wFlag As Long) _ As Long

Code:

'call it like so
'call msgbox(dlhfindwin&(me,"text of window",false))
'or to Get the caption Do this
'call msgbox(getcaption$(dlhfindwin&(me,"text of window",false)))

Public Function GetCaption(lhWnd As Long) As String

Dim sA As String, lLen As Long

lLen& = GetWindowTextLength(lhWnd&)

sA$ = String(lLen&, 0&)

Call GetWindowText(lhWnd&, sA$, lLen& + 1)
   GetCaption$ = sA$

End Function

Public Function DLHFindWin(frm As Form, WinTitle As String, _
CaseSensitive As Boolean) As Long

Dim lhWnd As Long, sA As String

lhWnd& = frm.hwnd

DoEvents
      If lhWnd& = 0 Then Exit Do
         If CaseSensitive = False Then
             sA$ = LCase$(GetCaption(lhWnd&))
             WinTitle$ = LCase$(WinTitle$)
         Else
             sA$ = GetCaption(lhWnd&)
         End If

If InStr(sA$, WinTitle$) Then
          DLHFindWin& = lhWnd&
          Exit Do
       Else
         DLHFindWin& = 0
       End If

lhWnd& = GetNextWindow(lhWnd&, 2)

Loop

End Function