New to the API.. Need Guidance

[zzfive03]

Hello;

I am sort of new to the WIN API. I have been asked to write a program that will start up an old legacy program, which has a decoder method. This decoder is able to open some files in a "readable format".

The idea is, I should write a program that can programaticly start up this program, use the API to navigate the applications screens/menues, and get it to select these files, and print them to file. Once I have them in a file (in a readable format) I can do with them as I will.

The reason I need this to be programatic is because there are several thousands of these files, and we want to automate the process. Is the Windows API the right way to go on this? Can someone please give me some advice, perhaps a link of where I can get info on getting to thie programs menues, etc

Thank you in advance.
Mark

 

[palbano]

What a freakin hack. It would be more robust and easier to just create a new windows product that does the data transformations directly. All you would need is the data format specifications.

-pete

 

[vb5prgrmr]

palbano,

I don't know about you but I have had to in the past use some legacy code because it was "tested and certified" and it being part of the contract, so perhaps this is what zzfive03 needs to do.

zzfive03,

There are programs that you can buy off the shelf to do exactly what you want to do and some of them even will let you in to the code that they create so you can extend their product. The price of the one we bought at work I belive was less than 100.00 USD. I would think that you may want to check out these automation programs before you start coding because I belive you will save more money with the purchase, but if you really want to start coding this then...

ShellExecuteEx
Sleep
WaitForSingleObject
TerminateProcess
SendMessage

and probably a whole lot more...

At MS's home page search for API and when the results come back select the API home page you will be able to research these and other API's from there.

Good Luck