How to catch Popup windows?

The pop-up windows that cause trouble are not internet explorer based windows, they are actually ‘Windows’ windows, (sorry if thats confusing). The ones that I am referring to are the ones that come up when, for example, you click on a download link. These are inherently a pain because of the fact that they are not IE windows. Luckily there is a pretty simple work around that i have come up with.

Ruby has access to the WIN32OLE library , which is basically like an API for windows applications. What you can do is use this library to catch these pop up windows. Below is the code that you’ll need to run in a Ruby script:

require ‘win32ole’ #Loads the win32ole library
wsh = WIN32OLE.new(Wscript.Shell) #For more info click here
wsh.AppActivate(‘Connect’) #Focuses on a given application based on its Title

At this point you can manipulate the window, for example, with a SendKeys command:

wsh.SendKeys(“%{F4}”) #This would close the program with Alt-F4

This clearly has it’s limitations because during this time you cannot be doing things on your computer, because the AppActivate would fail. I am still looking for a lower level at which I can address this problem.

Now everyone likes to see code at work, so I have written a quick script that goes to the Notepad++ downloads page, clicks the download link, and then closes the pop-up download window. As a quick side note, if you do not already use notepad++ I highly recommend it!

require ‘win32ole’
require ‘watir’

wsh = WIN32OLE.new(‘Wscript.Shell’)

ie= Watir::IE.new
ie.goto(“http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm”)
ie.frame(:name, “index”).link(:text, “Download”).click #Good example of how to execute a link in a Frame
ie.frame(:name, “index”).link(:text, “Download Notepad++ executable files”).click

sleep 20 #need to wait for source forge to load it is slow
ie1 = Watir::IE.attach(:title, /Source/)
ie1.link(:id, “showfiles_download_file_pkg0_1rel0_2″).click

wsh.AppActivate(“File Download – Security Warning”) #Focuses on the pop up window
wsh.SendKeys(“%{F4}”) #Sends the alt-F4 command to the window to close it

Watir::IE.close_all #Closes all open IE windows