Programmatically clicking a menu item in c#

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I have an old Smalltalk application that is running and I want to have my c# program access its menu and click on an item. The app has 4 submenus and at this point just being able to see it call any one would be good.

I have been going around in circles googling this but have not got it working. What do I need in my code to click on a menu item?

One example I saw mentioned SendMessage and I see another with PostMessage?

So far I have...

C#

private const uint WM_COMMAND = 0x111;

            IntPtr theWindow = (IntPtr)0;
            theWindow = FindWindow((string)null, "My Smalltalk App");


              IntPtr hMainMenu = GetMenu(theWindow);
              IntPtr hMenu = GetSubMenu(hMainMenu, 0);
             uint MenuID = GetMenuItemID(hMenu, 1);  // for future use

             PostMessage(hMenu, WM_COMMAND, 2, 0);   //  Does not compile

Sorry but I have little experience of Win API usage and I am trying to get a proof of concept working.

Could someone be kind enough to give me some code that would click a menu item?

Thanks in advance,

John.

Posted 29-Jul-15 7:54am

ukjohnct

Updated 29-Jul-15 9:06am

Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan

v2

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 29-Jul-15 14:48pm

Why using "WinAPI" (P/Invoke) at all? What do you want to achieve?
—SA

[no name] 29-Jul-15 15:43pm

Did you prototype PostMessage and that's the reason it won't compile?

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Answer 1 · 2015-07-29T09:06:00

Please see my comment to the question. So far, I don't see any reason for doing what you are doing.

But a useful answer can be done even without understanding what you are doing, because this is related to one pretty common misconception: the idea to invoke an event instead of just handling it.

If you used pure .NET and .NET events, you would not be able to directly invoke any events defined in .NET FCL, because .NET does not allow event invocation from anywhere except the code of the method of the type where the event member is declared; this is an important fool-proof feature. (Of course, some types can expose some methods doing it explicitly, such as with WPF RaiseEvent; consider it as some backdoor implemented by some types.) The thing is: you don't really need it.

The right approach is simple: by saying "programmatically clicking a menu item" you never really mean a click. (Only a use can click something with a mouse; there are no "programmatic click", it can only be some emulation.) You really mean to achieve the same exact effect as with click. If you have such effect, it means that you have an handler added to an invocation list of some event instance. If you do so, you can call some function, only one function from this handler, and this function can be declared separately. All you need is to call this function elsewhere. Yes, as simple as that.

—SA

ukjohnct · Answer 2 · 2015-07-31T11:38:00

For the sake of teh demo I got a solution working using Sendkeys.

C#

SendKeys.SendWait("%A");
SendKeys.SendWait("p");

% = ALT, so ALT A would take me to a sub menu and p selects the menu that I needed.

I beleive there still must be a better solution but this one got me through the demo.

thanks to everyone for their comments.

Programmatically clicking a menu item in c#

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