Scraping a window/screen image (from another app)

[Justin Goeres]

Greetings all. Sometime lurker, first time poster.

I need to get some basic information from a flash application running in a browser window (on Windows). I know there are probably several various ways to skin this cat, but the one I've settled on is to scrape the image of the window (screen) into a bitmap and check target pixels on that image for color. This just needs to be a quick 'n' dirty hack (for now).

So, with that background, does anyone know of a way to get a screen image (or window image) into LabVIEW in some kind of usable form?

I've tried sending PrintScreen key events, which basically gets me as far as having the screen image on the clipboard, but then I can't figure out how to get it off.

Another option might be to save the image to disk (with ScreenPrint32 or something similar) and read it in, but all this needs to happen in a few hundred milliseconds.

Any ideas?

[Jim Kring]

Hello Justin,

You could use an ActiveX Screen capture tool. For example: My Screen Capture ActiveX 1.20. Here is a quick and dirty example (attached). I wasn't able to do a direct memory transfer of the image, but I was able to transfer via disk (BMP file). If you need this to go faster, you could create a RAM disk.

Download File:post-17-1129047931.vi

[Phillip Brooks]

Image Toolbox by George Zou.

http://www.geocities.com/gzou999/gtool.html

The diagram have been removed, but the output returns Pixmap data for use in your application.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Image Toolbox by George Zou.

http://www.geocities.com/gzou999/gtool.html

The diagram have been removed, but the output returns Pixmap data for use in your application.

Not that you would probably get much from the diagram! The actual code is most probably almost all implemented in C inside a Call Library Node or a Code Interface Node.

Rolf Kalbermatter