4 replies to this topic

[817moose]

Hey there,

I am 5 minutes new to the forum, but have an important question I hope someone here can answer for me. I am looking for a program that looks for specific keywords within another program. Something like ctrl F in a browser or on Microsoft word because not all programs allow you to do this especially when the categories are separate.

Let me expand. I use a program for work called SalesLogix. I enter a new note in an account when a phone number is no longer valid that says “number no good.” Eventually I want to go back and look up all those numbers but I do not want to manually check each account in a database of 300. If there was a program I could run that would look for the term “number no good” within SalesLogix it would be a massive help. If you know of one that already exists, please point me in the right direction.

If you don’t know of one, but know how to make one we can talk about the development of the program for some $ compensation if interested. Thank you all for your help in Advance and I am excited to be a part of this forum!

[WingedPanther]

If you have direct access to the database, and it is SQL compliant (such as MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL, etc), then it's a simple SQL query.

[LuthfiHakim]

If the program uses common windows control (e.g. usual text editor like you see in notepad, one line text editor, or even rich text editor like you find in WordPad) then it can be done. Because windows provides common way to access them therefore we can access them from external applications.

[817moose]

Can you please expand on how it can be done second poster? I appreciate both of your feedback :)

[LuthfiHakim]

I assume that it's me who you refer as second poster, so here it goes. Those common controls can be controlled using windows messages. You can read text inside them, you can set text inside them, you can also select/highlight parts of their text, all by using windows messages. So basically your tasks would be:

1. Read the text from a control.
2. Search for your terms.
3. When found, highlight the found text.
4. Repeat step 2 and 3 until the searched term not found.

If you have Windows SDK, you can get more detail information on the windows message. Sorry, it's 3 in the morning here and I only use my memory here, so I can only give you two exact names of the windows messages that you might be interested, I don't guarantee the accuracy those after the first two: WM_SETTEXT, WM_GETTEXT, EM_SELSTART, EM_SELCHANGE.

If you don't have Windows SDK, you can always check out msdn.net.