Pop up creator - am i mad?

[igessey]

Good afternoon

We are having an issue with an application in my office.
To cut a long story short, people are selecting the wrong option on a drop down list in a 3rd party application.

No amounts of signs or notices will stop folks selecting this wrong option - the vendors will not rewrite the software either.
What i am therefore looking to do is create some form of pop-up or reminder that appears when this application reaches a certain point.
The best way i can do this, i imagine, is by monitoring the registry for the exact point when this selection box appears...

Can anybody assist with any ideas?

Thanks

 

[strongm]

>monitoring the registry for the exact point when this selection box appears...

Why should monitoring the registry be of any assistance in spotting when a dropdown listbox appears? Is there some documentation with the app that suggests that this si the case?

 

[gmmastros]

Presumably, the data is stored in a database. There are some pretty cool things you can do with a database.

1. You could write an app that connects to the database. Whenever a certain value appears in a table, you could hav the app send an email to the user instructing them to fix that data.

2. If it's a SQL Server database, you could have the database send the email.

3. You could write a trigger that automatically converts the data from 1 value to another.

You cannot (as strongm suggests) use the registry to determine when the drop down is occuring.

What type of database are you using?

-George

Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause. - Fortune cookie wisdom

 

[AndyGroom]

If it was me with this issue I'd go for a slightly unconventional approach and use a hex editor to change the text in the menu to something else of equal length. Although it wouldn't stop people clicking it at least you could change it to something less tempting.

- Andy
___________________________________________________________________
If you think nobody cares you're alive, try missing a couple of mortgage payments

 

[tsdragon]

Andy's suggestion sounds like a good one to me. That's what I'd probably do.

Tracy Dryden

Meddle not in the affairs of dragons,
For you are crunchy, and good with mustard.

 

[igessey]

Sounds like a good idea Andy - its a bit of a business critical software app, so i need to be careful!

Presumably i could use this hex editor just to change the names in the drop down list to "DO NOT USE" or something like that?

To be honest, people tend to even forget that they need to change this setting - the program will let them them continue, but it will just not give them the desired result (thats why i was hoping for the pop-up window option when this app got to a certain stage).

Thanks

 

[AndyGroom]

Yes, I'm afraid I can't point you towards a hex editor but I'm sure there must be free ones that you can download. Alternatively you could knock up a bit of VB code to read the EXE file into a string, alter the text and then write it back over the EXE file, but the crucial thing is to replace the text with something the same length even if you have to pad it out with spaces.

Eg: "Format hard disc" becomes
"Ignore this opt."

If the dropdown list was stored in a resource file then you'll find that the text probably appears in the EXE like this "F o r m a t h a r d d i s c " where every other character is ascii0 - I just mention that in case you go the VB editor route and can't find the text you want to alter.

- Andy
___________________________________________________________________
If you think nobody cares you're alive, try missing a couple of mortgage payments