I have written an application that currently handles clicks from multiple mouse devices.
I used this project and modified to handle mouse clicks as apposed to keyboards.
This is working fine, however now I need to know if there is a way to suppress a click event if it has been handled by my app. The app is a quiz game so the idea is that the quiz master will have (and still be able to use) 1 mouse, and the other contestants will have their own mouse (as buzzers). So when they buzz in, I don't want the mouse click events to fire in the operating system (or at least this application).
The concept is the familiar override of void WndProc(ref Message message), and so I have tried not calling base.WndProc(ref Message) when I don't want the click events to fire, but this has not worked.
Can anybody point me in the right direction here?
Should I be going down the windows hook route? I have looked at this, but I can't seem to work out how I could hook to each mouse device individually.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Edit:
This is a Windows Form UI project, and not WPF. So the MultiPoint SDK from Microsoft won't work.
The solution to this lies within not WndProc, but PreFilterMessage(). By intercepting messages before they even reach the form, you can remove them from the message pump causing them to never reach the control that was clicked. This also works for child controls within the form.
I answered this and posted the full source in the following question:
C# Get Mouse handle (GetRawInputDeviceInfo)
Related
I've been trying to figure out how to fake, not simulate, keyboard and mouse input. By this I mean the system goes through the process as if the actual event occurred, such as a mouse click, but does not actually perform the event, such as clicking the mouse.
Or if you wanted to make the system think your mouse had moved even though it did not. Sort of a "virtual" move that doesn't actually happen/effect the mouse.
Is it possible to override the simulated mouse clicks and events to make them not actually click while the system thinks they have?
Here is a nice project that wraps the keyboard and mouse. Here is the mouse input simulator file for reference. To see the lower level work, navigate to the WindowsInput.Native namespace in that project.
Thanks guys for all of your help. I was finally able to achieve what I wanted via lrb's answer.
I used that library to fake input and in the grand scheme of things I was trying to make a mouse jiggler but not actually effecting the user's mouse in case the application was running while the user was using the mouse. Which is why I wanted to "fake" the mouse rather than move the actual mouse. Thanks again for everything this was amazing.
Icemanind I'm still curious about your idea with subscribing an event rather than having an event handler. This would allow me to induce something like a mouse click without actually clicking correct?
Well, the project has moved along rather nicely and we have a pretty darn good product, but a wrench has been thrown into the gear works.
We have a C# 2012 application that interacts with another application (written in VB 6 of all things) and we can do a good bit with it so far, but we have a problem.
We need to select a button on a toolbar at the top of this particular application's window, but the button is not available through an API search. We have the main window's handle and can see all of its children, but I think the Toolbar is a User type control that we can't access through the API Calls. This application is very poorly designed and we had to do a LOT of work just to discover TWO User ID text boxes on the logon screen.
Anyway, my question is this: How would I set up a call to the main window and click a certain X, Y coordinate of that window's viewable area? I am using SendMessage to send mouse clicks to press a button control already, but if I can't get access to that button control, the idea was to send mouse clicks to a specific coordinate of the window.
Any ideas folks? Thanks!
It looks like the solution will be to get the Window's rectangle and add the offset in order to use the mouse event API call.
Thank you to #Idle_Mind for the suggestion. It is at least working on our test environment. It will be next week before we can test the solution out in our client's environment.
I've a Windows Form Application that does a simple task : the user selects a video in the main form, and the application pops up a new form with a Shockwave Flash Object reproducing it.
What i would like to do now is to move in the Movie timeline when the user scrolls the mouse wheel. The problem is, the Flash object steals the focus from the form as soon as it pops up, and it doesn't support a mousewheel event.
Is there a way to do it, other than hooking the MouseWheel event and redirect it to the application when the popup has the focus?
The window displayed by Flash is owned by a different process. That makes messing with messages difficult, you'll at least need a low-level mouse hook to see the mouse message before it disappears into the other process.
The boilerplate code is available here. Beware that it has a bug that prevents it from working on .NET 4 and up, see this answer for the workaround.
I have a NotifyIcon in the system tray. How can I detect when the user has left-clicked down on it? I assumed the MouseDown event would be what I want to use but it only handles right click and middle-button click. For left-click, it only fires after the user has let go (as in they've just performed a normal click). Is there a way to get the MouseDown event only?
This is by design, the shell synthesizes the MouseDown message from the up event. You'll see why it works this way when you click and hold the button down and then start dragging. Note how the notification area overflow window pops up and lets you drag the icon into it to remove it from the visible area. It can't work both ways.
Technically you could hook the window owned by Explorer.exe to get a crack at the messages before Explorer does with SetWindowsHookEx(). That however requires a kind of DLL that you cannot write in C#, it needs to be injected into Explorer. Very destabilizing and hard to beat the competition that is trying to do the same thing. Also the kind of code that causes sleepless nights for the Microsoft appcompat team.
It appears that the underlying Win32 API Shell_NotifyIcon sends a WM_LBUTTONDOWN message when the user clicks the icon. According to MSDN anyway.
Examining the Windows Forms source code for NotifyIcon reveals standard mouse down event handling, so if the Win32 message was being sent at the "correct" time it would work as you want/expect.
I have to agree with a previous comment that NotifyIcon will be swallowing WM_LBUTTONDOWN since it needs to do mouse capture to allow the user to drag the icons about.
It's possible that this article about creating a tray icon for WPF will be useful since it shows how to use SetWindowsHookEx etc from C#.
I've written a c# application which automates an instance of IE. I'd like to know when internet explorer gains focus and when it looses focus.
From the SHDocVw.InternetExplorer object I can get it's HWND. From there how can I create a message hook to receive WM_KILLFOCUS and WM_FOCUS events (assuming those are the correct events to be listening for :))?
Thanks everyone!!
UPDATE: I found a way I could use to accomplish the above goal without using hooks (which I haven't quite figured out how to do in c# yet), using the .NET framework in this question.
The problem with this code
AutomationFocusChangedEventHandler focusHandler
= new AutomationFocusChangedEventHandler(OnFocusChanged);
Automation.AddAutomationFocusChangedEventHandler(focusHandler);
is that it is easy for a window to be the foreground window and that event won't fire when that window is switched to because it's waiting for a specific UI Element to be in focus. (To test this you can use a function that uses that code and prints a message everytime a new window is in focus, such as the MSDN sample TrackFocus, and then click on a webbrowser. When most webpages or a blank page is being displayed in the browser the event wont fire until the address bar or some other element is selected.) It could probably work if there was a way to modify so that it could throw the event if either no UI Element is in focus or every time an element lost focus (instead being thrown when it gains focused). Anyone have any ideas on how I could fix the above code to solve my problem?
Update 2: I just came across this (article claims you can only hook to mouse and keyboard from c#) as well which may mean I can't use hooks at all for what I'd like to do.
Detailed instructions on setting up a hook from C# are here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318804/en-us?fr=1