Develop Reference

Keyboard shortcut using Keys

apologies for my basic question but I am a kinda java newbie and I would love to write a code that will do a keyboard shortcut CTRL + A.
I have imported:
import org.sikuli.hotkey.Keys;
import org.sikuli.script.Key;
and wrote a variety of codes similar to this:
Keys.CTRL + KeyEvent.VK_A / Keys.A / ...
Unfortunately, I did not manage to make it work..
I have two issues:
how to make it work as a keyboard shortcut
how to add code of an "A"
I have read about the modifiers and tried to find a solution here but without a bit of luck.
I was thinking about adding sth like KeyPress and KeyRelease but idk how to make it work.
Any suggestions?
Thank you in advance!

for anyone who is trying to do the same - I think I have found a solution:
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.KeyEvent;
try {
Robot r = new Robot();
r.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_CONTROL);
r.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_A);
r.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_A);
r.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_CONTROL);
} catch (AWTException ex) {
// Exception
}

How to detect a pressed key globally, in a window without focus in java? [duplicate]

I'm making a small program in Java using the Robot class. The program takes over the mouse. while in the course of debugging if it starts acting in a way that I don't want it's hard to quit the program, since I can't move the mouse over to the terminate button in eclipse, and I can't use hotkeys to hit it because the mouse is constant clicking in another window, giving that window focus instead.
What I'd like to do is just hook up a keylistener so that when I hit q I can quit the program, but the only way I know how to do this involves making a window, and that window needs focus to capture the input. Is there a way to listen for keyboard or mouse input from anywhere, regardless of what has focus?

There is a library that does the hard work for you:
https://github.com/kwhat/jnativehook

This is not a trivial problem and Java doesn't give you a way to do it elegantly. You can use a solution like banjollity suggested but even that won't work all the time if your errant mouse clicks open another fullsized window currently open in your taskbar for example.
The fact is, Java by default gives developers very little control over the OS. This is due to 2 main reasons: security (as citied by java documentation) and the fact that different operating systems handle events completely differently and making one unified model to represent all of these would probably not make a whole lot of sense.
So to answer your question, I imagine what you want is some kind of behaviour for your program where it listens for keypresses globally, not just in your application. Something like this will require that you access the functionality offered by your OS of choice, and to access it in Java you are going to need to do it through a Java Native Interface (JNI) layer.
So what you want to do is:
Implement a program in C that will listen for global keypresses on your OS, if this OS is Windows than look for documentation on windows hooks which is well docuemented by Microsoft and MSDN on the web and other places. If your OS is Linux or Mac OS X then you will need to listen for global keypresses using the X11 development libraries. This can be done on an ubunutu linux distro according to a Howto that I wrote at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=864566
Hook up your C code to your Java code through JNI. This step is actually the easier step. Follow the procedure that I use in my tutorial at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=864566 under both windows and linux as the procedure for hooking up your C code to your Java code will be identical on both OSes.
The important thing to remember is that its much easier to get your JNI code working if you first code and debug your C/C++ code and make sure that it is working. Then integrating it with Java is easy.

Had same problem. In my case, robot just controlled a single Windows App, that was maximized. I placed these lines at top of main loop driving the robot:
Color iconCenterColor = new Color(255,0,0); // if program icon is red
if (iconCenterColor.equals(robot.getPixelColor(10,15)))
throw new IllegalStateException("robot not interacting with the right app.");
To cancel the robot, just alt-tab to another app. Works great for a simple one app driving robot.

Start the program from a command line in a terminal and use Ctrl-C to terminate it.

(As mentioned by #MasterID and shown on JNativeHook's documentation for native keyboard input detection {main GitHub project here}),
This code should be enough to listen to any key without app focus (press and/or release):
>>Remember to add the jnativehook library in your project to be able to use all its utilities.<<
public class yourClass implements NativeKeyListener {//<-- Remember to add the jnativehook library
public void nativeKeyPressed(NativeKeyEvent e) {
System.out.println("Key Pressed: " + NativeKeyEvent.getKeyText(e.getKeyCode()));
}
public void nativeKeyReleased(NativeKeyEvent e) {
System.out.println("Key Released: " + NativeKeyEvent.getKeyText(e.getKeyCode()));
}
public void nativeKeyTyped(NativeKeyEvent e) {
System.out.println("Key Typed: " + NativeKeyEvent.getKeyText(e.getKeyCode()));
}
public static void main(String args[]){
//Just put this into your main:
try {
GlobalScreen.registerNativeHook();
}
catch (NativeHookException ex) {
System.err.println("There was a problem registering the native hook.");
System.err.println(ex.getMessage());
System.exit(1);
}
GlobalScreen.addNativeKeyListener(new yourClass());
//Remember to include this^ ^- Your class
}
}
For this particular problem, use the nativeKeyPressed method like this:
public void nativeKeyPressed(NativeKeyEvent e) {
System.out.println("Key Pressed: " + NativeKeyEvent.getKeyText(e.getKeyCode()));
if (e.getKeyCode() == NativeKeyEvent.VC_Q){
System.exit(1);
}
}
Note that JNativeHook by default shows a lot of stuff in your console that you might not want, to change that, just add this right before the try-catch that you used in the main function as shown (this is also going to turn off warning and error messages, more info here):
//(From here)
Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(GlobalScreen.class.getPackage().getName());
logger.setLevel(Level.OFF);
logger.setUseParentHandlers(false);
//(To there-^)
try {
GlobalScreen.registerNativeHook();
}
catch (NativeHookException ex) {
System.err.println("There was a problem registering the native hook.");
System.err.println(ex.getMessage());
System.exit(1);
}
Disclaimer: I know this question was solved years ago, I just hope someone finds this a little easier to find/use.

Have your program open a second window which displays underneath your main window but is maximised, then your errant mouse clicks will all be received by the maximised window, and it can receive your keyboard input.

Here's a pure Java way to do it to solve the problem you've described (not the KeyListener problem... the quit test early when using robot problem):
Throughout your test, compare the mouse position with one that your test has recently set it to. If it doesn't match, quit the test. Note: the important part of this code is the testPosition method. Here's code that I used recently:
public void testSomething() throws Exception {
try {
// snip
// you can even extract this into a method "clickAndTest" or something
robot.mouseMove(x2, y2);
click();
testPosition(x2, y2);
// snip
} catch (ExitEarlyException e) {
// handle early exit
}
}
private static void click() throws InterruptedException {
r.mousePress(InputEvent.BUTTON1_DOWN_MASK);
Thread.sleep(30 + rand.nextInt(50));
r.mouseRelease(InputEvent.BUTTON1_DOWN_MASK);
Thread.sleep(30 + rand.nextInt(50));
}
private static void testPosition(int x2, int y2) throws ExitEarlyException {
Point p = MouseInfo.getPointerInfo().getLocation();
if(p.x != x2 || p.y != y2) throw new ExitEarlyException();
}

How to press a keyboard key without a physical keyboard in selenium

I'm trying to build an automation script that will install a chrome extension.
On my local system (windows 10) all works fine while using Robot class with java, since I have a physical keyboard connected to my computer.
The problem is - when I try to run this automation on a virtual machine(Amazon EC2, windows server), the Robot class is not working because it doesn't detect a physical connection of a keyboard.
Is there any other way to simulate a keyboard stroke without a keyboard attached?
FYI, I have to use the keyboard because google install box is not part of the page and selenium wont recognize it.
I've tried the sendKeys function but it didn't work because it will affect only the webpage itself and not pop outside of the page

I believe you can use java robot functions to mimic the keyboard interactions.
Example:
package org.kodejava.example.awt;
import java.awt.AWTException;
import java.awt.Robot;
import java.awt.event.KeyEvent;
public class CreatingKeyboardEvent {
public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
Robot robot = new Robot();
// Create a three seconds delay.
robot.delay(3000);
// Generating key press event for writing the QWERTY letters
robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_Q);
robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_W);
robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_E);
robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_R);
robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_T);
robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_Y);
} catch (AWTException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}

I don't think you can do this with Selenium, cause it is meant to test webpages, not to automate a human-computer interaction.
If you want to automate a complex scheme like this, you may try a more complete solution, like UiPath :
https://www.uipath.com/
This is a solution meant for automation, so it will give you more tools to achieve your goal. It has a community edition which is free, and an active forum, so you should be able to handle it quickly !

Can I make an automated java application ignore JOptionPanes?

There is a java swing application that I need to automate one of the functions of. It's quite simple - the user clicks a button in the swing application and starts an action.
I made a small java application that includes the java swing application as a .jar and calls the action behind the button (read).
The problem is - in case of an exception, the swing .jar shows JOptionPane, which halts the automated execution. Is it possible to somehow override this behavior without altering the original jar?
Application structure:
Main.java
import com.swingapp.ui
public static void main(String[] args){
Swingapp.read();
}
Then the read() function in the Swingapp library:
public void read(){
try{
//do a bunch of stuff...
} catch (Exception ex){
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, ex.getMessage()); // In case of an exception, the swing application will show a message dialog. This halts the automated execution of my java task, I'd like to just skip this
}
When exception happens in above application, user is expected to click "OK". But running this as automated task, nobody there to click okay

Since a JOptionPane gains focus as soon as it opens (I think the most right button gets the focus, but it does not matter in your case) you can do the following:
Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().addAWTEventListener(new AWTEventListener() {
#Override
public void eventDispatched(AWTEvent arg0) {
Component c = KeyboardFocusManager.getCurrentKeyboardFocusManager().getFocusOwner();
while(c != null) {
if (c instanceof JOptionPane) {
try {
new Robot().keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_ENTER);
} catch (AWTException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
break;
}
}
c = c.getParent();
}
}
}, AWTEvent.FOCUS_EVENT_MASK);
It will traverse up to see if anything in the current hierarchy is an instance of JOptionPane. If so -> simulate that the user pressed Enter (Return) which will close the dialog even if the focus is in an input field.

I have following solution for you. You need to registrate a listener to monitor all window events. Use Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().addAWTEventListener(). If you get a window opened event, try to check whether the window is a JDialog and whether the dialog's contentPane contains an instance of JOptionPane. If yes you need traverse the component tree, find the first button and click it.

Create a simple form application to edit a textfile

I think I need to restate my question ...
I want to create a SIMPLE form application that edits certain areas of one very specific text file. Though I have some web development experience, I do not want to create a browser based application. Basically I want to give a Desktop application a try and I am looking for some help to get started including suggestions for the language of choice. The application should run on Mac OS X. Besides there's no restriction: Java, Cocoa, Python, even a some interactive shell script would be ok.
If you are interested in the details, continue to read here, but not that my question is not LaTex specific...:
I have an automatically generated report file that contains LaTex Code. Now I want to build a little application that creates a form field for every section and it's header. The document contains only a few hundred lines and the should work the following:
\section{ This is were the header text should go inside the document }
\normalsize{ This is where the normal text should go}
The header / normalsize pairs occur 5-6 times within the document. All I want is a little GUI that allows user to edit between the curly braces without seeing any TeX code. I know that there's LyX and other WYSIWYG approaches to LaTeX – I do not want to reinvent the wheel. I just want to protect the auto-generated code a litte from users and make it a little more comfortable to them.
EDIT:
here's my very first try. I guess I should use PlainDocument instead of directly sending it, but I´ll figure that out, since I got plenty of help from trashgod with the editor / Text Component links. The major problem is to single out the content from \section{} and \normalsize{} stuff. Probably I will some regexp here. I need to get a new text area for every appearance.
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileReader;
import javax.swing.*;
public class basicFrame extends JFrame {
// Declare Variables
JScrollPane bildlauf = new JScrollPane();
JTextArea txtfeld = new JTextArea();
public basicFrame() {
super();
// Main window
setTitle("ReportEditor");
setBackground(Color.LIGHT_GRAY);
// components
try {
File datei = new File("report.Rnw");
FileReader in = new FileReader(datei);
txtfeld.read(in, datei);
in.close();
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Error !");
}
// setLayout(new GridLayout(2,2));
// Scroll Shizzle
bildlauf.getViewport().add(txtfeld, null);
getContentPane().add(bildlauf, BorderLayout.CENTER);
//txtfeld.setSize(500,680);
//add(txtfeld);
//this.getContentPane().add(txtfeld);
// close
addWindowListener(new WindowLauscher());
}
// event handlers...
protected static final class WindowLauscher extends WindowAdapter {
public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e) {
System.exit(0);
}
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
//Fesnter erzeugen und anzeigen, die main Sache halt
basicFrame hf = new basicFrame();
hf.setSize(500, 700);
hf.setLocation(100, 100);
hf.setVisible(true);
}
}
Thx in advance for any suggestions!

The TeX on Mac OS X wiki recommends jEdit, which supports plugins. LaTeXTools might be a good start.
Addendum:
I do not want to reinvent the wheel.
All I want to do is create a form application.
Although these goals are somewhat contradictory, you can always parse the file and use a suitable JTextComponent for each editable section. Here's an overview of Using Text Components; see Text Component Features if you want to create your own editor kit, as discussed in Customizing a Text Editor.
Addendum: In addition to the tutorial, you might look at this text field layout example. Also, consider a two-column JTable, which would allow you to cleanly separate your document model from your form view.
Addendum: A few notes on your code.
Class names are usually capitalized, e.g. BasicFrame.
Don't extend JFrame if you're not changing it's behavior; JPanel is a good container for other components, and it can be displayed in a JFrame.
Always buid your GUI on the EDT.
Keep you view and model separate.