Setup guide

Window Paths
Several actions operate on certain desktop windows, like PostMessage or Keystroke to window. The Operating
System identifies windows on the desktop using a unique numerical value, called a window handle. These
handles are only valid for the life cycle of a window (i.e. the same window gets a different handle if you close and
reopen it). To be able to identify a window even between two sessions, uICE uses a different approach, called
window paths .
Windows are organized into a tree structure (see
Fig.1
), and grouped by the executable's name which created
the window. All windows directly beneath an executable (e.g. about:blank - Microsoft Internet Explorer (IEFrame)
beneath IEXPLORE.EXE) are so called top-level windows. Top-level windows have a caption bar and usually a
system menu, and they can create child windows like buttons, toolbars or other windows without title bar to
display documents for example. Every standard Windows application with user interface has one or more top-
level windows, one of these windows is usually called the application's main window.
Fig.1
To identify a top-level window, uICE uses the executable's name, the title (the name that appears in the caption
bar) and classname of the window. The classname belongs to an internal Windows structure describing a certain
class of windows, for example dialog boxes. Neither the title nor the classname need to be unique across the
system, but most windows can be identified by these two names. The Internet Explorer's main window, as
highlighted in the window picker tree image above, with the title about:blank - Microsoft Internet Explorer and the
classname IEFrame would be identified by its window path IEXPLORE.EXE\about:blank - Microsoft Internet
Explorer (IEFrame). Note the backslash delimiter, which separates a window from its childs and the executable,
similar to files on your harddisk. To identify a child window of IE's main window, let's say the window with the
classname ReBarWindow32, we would walk the tree down to this window and append each child window:
IEXPLORE.EXE\about:blank - Microsoft Internet Explorer (IEFrame)\(WorkerW)\(ReBarWindow32)
Note that windows can change their title at any time. Once you use Internet Explorer to navigate to a website, the
title of the main window changes to the title of the website, as shown in
Fig.2
: