Accessing Smartbox Grid 3 using Python and win32gui

Summary

Smartbox’s Grid 3 communication software creates two windows containing the words ‘Grid 3’ in their titles, even though you can only see one. If you are trying to interact with this software using your own program, you need to make sure to access the window that you intend to.

Problem

I wrote some Python code to detect the use of Grid 3 or Tobii’s Communicator software for this project, to visually show when somebody who uses eyegaze technology interacts with the software.

This post concentrates on the issue I had with finding the correct window that Grid 3 runs in. Grid 3 runs under Windows.

I use the pywin32 library to access the win32gui library. This library allows me to find which window is running the software that I want to monitor. However, after using this library to find the ‘grid 3’ window, my code kept on telling me that nothing was changing in the window, when I could clearly see something was. To make matters more confusing, the code seemed to run fine on one machine and not another.

Solution

Please find the the parts of the Python script needed to explain my solution below. All of the script is on my GitHub site.

import logging import win32gui

logging.basicConfig( format=’%(asctime)s.%(msecs)03d %(message)s’, level=logging.INFO, datefmt=’%H:%M:%S’)

COM_SOFTWARE = [‘grid’, ‘communicator’] IGNORE = [‘grid 3.exe’, ‘users’]

def find_window_handle(com_software=COM_SOFTWARE, ignore=IGNORE): ’’’ Find the window for communication software. ’’’ toplist, winlist = [], []

def \_enum\_cb(window\_handle, results):
    winlist.append((window\_handle, win32gui.GetWindowText(window\_handle)))

win32gui.EnumWindows(\_enum\_cb, toplist)
for sware in com\_software:
    # winlist is a list of tuples (window\_id, window title)
    logging.debug('items in ignore: {}'.format(\[item.lower() for item in ignore\]))
    for window\_handle, title in winlist:
        #logging.debug('window\_handle: {}, title: {}'.format(window\_handle, title))
        if sware in title.lower() and not any (x in title.lower() for x in ignore):
            logging.info('found title: {}'.format(title))
            return window\_handle
logging.info('no communications software found for {}'.format(com\_software))
time.sleep(0.5)

The critical debugging line is the commented out line 24:

logging.debug(‘window_handle: {}, title: {}’.format(window_handle, title))

When uncommented, and running the logging in debug mode, this listed out two windows that contained ‘Grid 3’ as part of their title, even though only a single Grid 3 window was visible. Even with just the ‘Users’ screen up, before launching a grid communication window, the logging.debug line returned two windows containing the name ‘Grid 3’ in their title:

grid: [(66532, ‘GDI+ Window (Grid 3.exe)’), (197532, ‘Grid 3 - Users’)]

When running one of the Grids (for testing I used the Super Core grid), the software still tells me there are two windows with ‘grid’ in the title:

grid: [(66532, ‘GDI+ Window (Grid 3.exe)’), (263256, ‘Grid 3 - Super Core - .CORE’)]

For this example, I could take the second window found and be done. However, to be robust, I created an IGNORE list, containing strings that are in the window titles that I do not want to use.

In the code example above, line 25 looks for the correct string to be in the window title and also checks that none of the strings in the IGNORE list are in the title:

if sware in title.lower() and not any (x in title.lower() for x in ignore):

This only passes the title for the window that I am interested in - the one containing the communication grid.

Testing

I use a Windows 10 virtual machine running in VirtualBox, with Debian Linux as the host. I also test on a separate Windows 10 only PC. I use a virtual machine for Windows for development as I run Linux on my laptop. The virtual machine allows me to create a static and controlled testing environment with only the software that I am working on in it. I double test on a stand alone Windows 10 machine in case the virtual environment somehow effects the software.

In this case, my script seemed to run well on one system and not another. I now suspect that sometimes the window that I was interested in was the only one generated by Grid 3 and at other times, the extra spurious Grid 3 window was generated as well. This spurious window was then selected by the software.