Re: using Firefox accessibility for modal dialogs automation

Hi Arkady,

On Wed, Jul 1, 2020 at 8:23 AM Arkady Ioffe <[email protected]> wrote:

> All job done, but I stuck with modal dialogs like alert, confirm, prompt
> , login ..
>
Do you mean modal dialogs created by Firefox or custom modal dialogs
created by your application? The reason for my confusion is that you
mention a login dialog. Firefox does present a login dialog, but only for
HTTP authentication, which is rarely used now. Is that the one you mean?

We decided to use Firefox accessibility for their automation.
> OS is Windows 10 professional. Current Firefox version is 68ESR.
> Cannot record user actions (button click, edit set Text, checkbox
> check), as no notification happens, when modal dialog appears despite
> of  MouseKeyboard Hook installed and initialized for all Firefox UI
> threads.
>
Exactly what Win32 hook is this and what notifications are you expecting?
Accessibility communicates events via win events; see SetWinEventHook:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/nf-winuser-setwineventhook

3.  Knowing the handle to the top level UI Firefox window, we finding a
> dialog by enumeration all windows belonging to the thread of top level
> UI Firefox window, until Criterion2 met.
> Here the Citerion2 is: window owner is the top level Firefox UI window,
> window has window class "MozillaDialogClass" or "#32770". And again
> comparison of our result with result of Microsoft tools showed that we
> find a dialog window without errors.
>
Modals like alert(),  prompt(), etc. don't use separate HWNDs. They use the
main Firefox HWND. Looking at the code, I do see some cases where
MozillaDialogClass is used, but I've actually never seen this; it may be
legacy or just a wrapper window.
#32770 is for system dialogs which are not managed by Firefox.

Finding a Firefox dialog would be pretty tricky. Instead, I'd suggest
watching for EVENT_OBJECT_FOCUS win events (one of which will be fired when
the dialog appears) and looking to see if one of the ancestors has
ROLE_SYSTEM_DIALOG. Alternatively, I guess you could use
AccessibleObjectFromPoint, but you would need to do this on the main
Firefox HWND.

Hope this helps.

jamie