From: Eric Christopherson <echristopherson@...>
Date: 2010-10-29T05:57:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Web App with Windows GUI

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 1:32 AM, Mike Stephens <rubfor@recitel.net> wrote:
> Charles Calvert wrote in post #957671:
>> Mike, is there any chance that you could tell us what this application
>> does?  Someone may be able to suggest an alternative that you could
>> automate directly from Ruby or indirectly via COM.
>
> Its a VB Health Insurance package. The application is to register, view
> and update new hospitals and spec|alists, and to allow them to check
> whether a patient has cover. So it's just reading and writing data to
> text boxes, dropdowns etc

I would be very cautious when automating that sort of program, or any
large program where you care a lot about the data. I've found that
AutoHotkey doesn't always work exactly right, even if it works when I
step through each procedure manually. Whether that's generally from
bugs in AutoHotkey or in the app being scripted, I don't know
(although in one case I'm sure it was a bug in the underlying app that
a script just happened to uncover; in that app, I would get a SOAP
exception if I copied a certain field to the clipboard and immediately
after that clicked a certain button).