How do I right click on a windows tray icon and clicking on item on context menu in Python?

Question

I need to right click on a Windows Notification Tray icon, and select (left clicking) one of the items on the resulting context menu.

I have tried to use pywinauto, and while running this code from the code on the How To's page: from pywinauto.application import Application from pywinauto import taskbar

# connect to outlook
outlook = Application().connect_(process=4436)

# click on Outlook's icon
taskbar.ClickSystemTrayIcon(12)

# Select an item in the popup menu
outlook.PopupMenu.MenuClick("Cancel Server Request")

I am getting the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\dev\consumertms\temp.py", line 25, in <module>
    taskbar.ClickSystemTrayIcon(12)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pywinauto\taskbar.py", line 52, in ClickSystemTrayIcon
    button = _get_visible_button_index(button)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pywinauto\taskbar.py", line 42, in _get_visible_button_index
    if not SystemTrayIcons.GetButton(i).fsState & \
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pywinauto\controls\common_controls.py", line 1878, in GetButton
    button.idCommand)
RuntimeError: GetButtonInfo failed for button with command id 2

I am currently running Windows 8, but will require this to run on Windows XP onwards.

I have searched around and was unable to find a workaround for this.

My Question: Is there a workaround for this error? If not, is there some other Python module I can use to automate this process? Some code snippets will be very much appreciated.

Thanks

I need to automate this in Python or C++ (which I will use via ctypes) — heavenslife
There is a python's module for automation with MSAA technology - github.com/phuslu/pyMSAA You will not be able to do right click (sometimes even left click) on tray icons, but you could get coordinates of the icon and then click with pywinauto's ClickInput method, using this coordinates. Unfortunately I have no examples now. — SWAPYAutomation

uzumaki uzumaki · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-08T04:14:11

A context menu or dropdown menu can be a window context on it's own. You will need to find it with findwindows.find_windows().

I encountered this problem when I needed to access dropdown menu items on a non-native GUI. The easiest way to get the class name of that windows is by using SWAPY, which lists all window objects and creates handy pywinauto code https://code.google.com/p/swapy/.

A typical approach would be like this:

outlook = Application().connect_(process=4436)
taskbar.ClickSystemTrayIcon(12)

# Use SWAPY to find the class name of the popup menu
w_handle = findwindows.find_windows(title=u'', class_name='name-found-in-SWAPY')[0]
popup = app.window_(handle=w_handle)
popup.Click(coords=(x,y))

How do I right click on a windows tray icon and clicking on item on context menu in Python?

1 Answers