The regular Auckland Python Meetup has been held on 23 October where Valentin (airelil) presented the project. Unfortunately video wasn't recorded this time. However the slides are still available for everyone. A small insight into Pywinauto internals describing principles of controls name resolution and introductory examples can make your automation scripting a bit easier.
One of the quite popular (strangely) questions, that popped out on the presentation too, is "How can I interact with a console window of cmd.exe?". In this case, Pywinauto couldn't be the answer though. We believe that a GUI automation tool should be used for GUI not a command line. :)
The standard way to send keyboard input to the console application is using subprocess.Popen() object with stdin=subprocess.PIPE and stdout=subprocess.PIPE arguments that are well described in the Python docs.
Interestingly, a person on Stack Overflow discovered that it's possible to send characters to cmd.exe using WM_CHAR window message. It even works silently for a minimized console window. That is could be considered as an alternative for the TypeKeys method in Pywinauto which runs for the active window only. However you have to remember that TypeKeys performs a closer real user behavior emulation than sending of WM_CHAR message or calling SetText for a GUI control.
One of the quite popular (strangely) questions, that popped out on the presentation too, is "How can I interact with a console window of cmd.exe?". In this case, Pywinauto couldn't be the answer though. We believe that a GUI automation tool should be used for GUI not a command line. :)
The standard way to send keyboard input to the console application is using subprocess.Popen() object with stdin=subprocess.PIPE and stdout=subprocess.PIPE arguments that are well described in the Python docs.
Interestingly, a person on Stack Overflow discovered that it's possible to send characters to cmd.exe using WM_CHAR window message. It even works silently for a minimized console window. That is could be considered as an alternative for the TypeKeys method in Pywinauto which runs for the active window only. However you have to remember that TypeKeys performs a closer real user behavior emulation than sending of WM_CHAR message or calling SetText for a GUI control.