Window Finder

Sometimes you just have to find a window by trundling through the whole windows hierarchy. I know, however, that our apps are supposed to communicate in a more sophisiticated way. The MSDN section on inter-process communications just contains three sub-sections; DDE, mailslots and pipes. I just think they're trying to be generic here by suggesting approaches that can be published and used by third parties. If both the apps are mine however, then I personally prefer mutexes and windows messages (by preference) or events and shared memory(if necessary).

Applying this philosophy means that from time to time i need to play "find the window" and I have finally got round to writing a relatively generic class to do this. Being that kind of guy, I thought i'd share it with you all so you can have a good snigger.

Here it is: surprisingly named: WindowFinder

#pragma once

#include "../../StdString.h"

struct WinFindData

{

    WinFindData(CStdString sTextToFind) :    m_sTextToFind(sTextToFind), 

                                            m_bFound(false)              , 

                                            m_hWnd(NULL)             {}

    CStdString m_sTextToFind;

    bool m_bFound;

    HWND m_hWnd;

};

class WindowFinder

{

public:

    WindowFinder(CStdString sWindowTitle);

    virtual ~WindowFinder(){};

    bool Find(HWND hWnd, HWND& pHwndFound);

    HWND GetHWND()

    {

        return m_hWnd;

    }

private:

    CStdString m_sWindowTitle;

    HWND m_hWnd;

    static BOOL CALLBACK EnumChildProc( HWND hwnd, LPARAM lParam);

};

WindowFinder::WindowFinder(CStdString sWindowTitle) 

            : m_sWindowTitle(sWindowTitle)

{

}

bool WindowFinder::Find(HWND hWnd, HWND& pHwndFound)

{

    WinFindData winFindData(m_sWindowTitle);

    LPARAM lParam =(LPARAM)&winFindData;

    EnumChildWindows(hWnd, WindowFinder::EnumChildProc, lParam);

    pHwndFound = winFindData.m_hWnd;

    return winFindData.m_bFound;

}

BOOL CALLBACK WindowFinder::EnumChildProc( HWND hWnd, LPARAM lParam)

{

    WinFindData* pData = (WinFindData*)lParam;

    if(pData->m_bFound)

        return TRUE;

    CStdString sWindowTitle = pData->m_sTextToFind;

    CStdString sText;

    ::GetWindowText(hWnd, sText.GetBuffer(MAX_PATH),MAX_PATH);

    sText.ReleaseBuffer();

    if(sWindowTitle.CompareNoCase(sText) ==0)

    {

        pData->m_bFound = true;

        pData->m_hWnd    = hWnd;

        return TRUE;

    }

    else

    {

        WindowFinder finder(pData->m_sTextToFind);

        if( finder.Find(hWnd, pData->m_hWnd))

        {

            pData->m_bFound = true;

            pData->m_hWnd   = finder.GetHWND();

        }

    }

    return TRUE;

}