wine users - Aug 2006 - Using wine for automatization

Hello list

I have a windows application that is runnable under wine. Now i want  
this app to be controllable without the gui. For Reasons somewhere  
between licensing,a crazy management, and legal issues this app cant  
be replaced be a better solution nor can i reverse engineer it to  
find out what is does and then recode that. And it has to run under  
linux.
So the plan for automatization is to find the places where wine  
builds buttons, lists, text-fields and so on and then hook come code  
there to rip out every element of the gui to give it to another  
controlling app. The other way the controll app then has to call the  
wine mouse and keyboard event functions to control the windows  
application.
So far so Good. Problem is that i'm  new in wine and windows foo.  
Producing the actual code should be no problem, but understanding how  
and were wine does thinks like building  gui elements is hard if you  
have no clue about this mass of source-code wine consists of.
So my question is were to start, how to find out what functions are  
called to build elements of the gui,what dll's are used for this, are  
there any tools that are helpful and so on. I currently  collecting  
as many information as  possible, so anything you post is helpful.
Or is this the wrong list for something like this, maybe i should  
post on the dev ml. questions over questions... :)

Thanks in advance for any response

Dirk

Dirk Theelen wrote:
> I have a windows application that is runnable under wine. Now i want
> this app to be controllable without the gui.
Here's a suggestion, anyway.

Redirect the application's X display to an X server running Xvfb (X
virtual framebuffer).
That way the GUI will be hidden from view.

Try if you can control the application by sending mouse / keyboard
commands through it's message loop using the standard Win32 API
functions - PostMessage (or SendMessage) with WM_MOUSExxx and
WM_KEYxxx messages.

You could be relieved of having to modify Wine sources this way, I think.

Perhaps you can even use automation software such as AutoIt or
AutoHotkey instead of a homegrown solution.

Hope it's helpful =)