Drag and drop items from windows explorer to application using UFT

Aneejian · Aug 08, 2016 · 4 mins read.

Drag and drop items from windows explorer to application using UFT

A tutorial on how to drag and drop items from windows explorer to an application using UFT/QTP.

QTP or UFT does not have a default functionality to drag an item from the windows explorer window to application under test.

Let us consider a scenario where we want to drag an image from windows explorer to TinEye, which is one of the best image search and recognition company.

Manual steps

  • Access TinEye website.
  • Identify the area where a drag and drop facility is available.
  • Open image location using windows explorer.
  • Select the image in the folder and drag it to the website. 

If you try to record these steps with UFT, you will discover that UFT will not capture the drag and drop operation. This is because of the security features set up in Windows. For this to work in UFT you have to run UFT as administrator and run windows explorer as administrator programmatically. Windows security settings will not allow this to happen. In this post, we introduce a subroutine as a workaround for this problem.

Here is what the subroutine does.

Parameters to pass

  • FilePath - the path of the file to drag and drop (e.g. "C:\Users\Public\Pictures\Sample Pictures\Koala.jpg")
  • DropAreaObject - pass the object on which file has to be dropped

Subroutine Action

  • Check whether the file exists
  • Create a browser window object
  • Create explorer windows object
  • Open folder path
  • Resize and move the folder window
  • Select the item passed
  • Detect the position of the file in the explorer window
  • Resize and move the browser window
  • Move the drop area to view
  • Detect the position of the drop area
  • Drag item from windows explorer to drop area and release mouse to drop the item

The Subroutine

Sub DragItemFromWindowsExplorerToIe(ByVal FilePath, ByVal DropAreaObject)
	'Creating file system object
	Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
	'Checking if file exist
	If fso.FileExists(FilePath) Then
		'Creating device replay object
		Set dr = CreateObject("Mercury.DeviceReplay")
		'Creating Windows forms control object
		Set ctlr = DotNetFactory.CreateInstance("System.Windows.Forms.Control")
		FolderPath = fso.GetParentFolderName(FilePath)
		FolderPathArray = Split(FolderPath, "\")
		FolderName = FolderPathArray(UBound(FolderPathArray))
		FileName = fso.GetFileName(FilePath)
		'Adding description for Internet Explorer Window
		Set IEWindowDesc = Description.Create
		IEWindowDesc("micclass").Value = "Window"
		IEWindowDesc("regexpwndtitle").Value = ".*Internet Explorer.*"
		IEWindowDesc("regexpwndclass").Value = "IEFrame"
		Set IEWindow = Window(IEWindowDesc)
		'Adding description for Folder Window
		Set ExplorerWindowDesc = Description.Create
		ExplorerWindowDesc("micclass").Value = "Window"
		ExplorerWindowDesc("regexpwndtitle").Value = FolderName
		ExplorerWindowDesc("text").Value = FolderName
		ExplorerWindowdesc("Location").Value = 0
		ExplorerWindowDesc("regexpwndclass").Value = "CabinetWClass"
		Set ExplorerWindow = Window(ExplorerWindowDesc)
		'Opening the folder path
		SystemUtil.Run FolderPath,"","","explore"
		'Resizing and moving the folder window
		ExplorerWindow.Resize 600,700
		ExplorerWindow.Move 0,0
		Set FileToDrag = ExplorerWindow.WinObject("nativeclass:=window", "acc_name:=Items View").WinList("nativeclass:=list", "acc_name:=Items View")
		FileToDrag.Select FileName
		FilePosX = ctlr.MousePosition.X
		FilePosY = ctlr.MousePosition.Y
		'Moving the browser window
		IEWindow.Restore
		IEWindow.Move 700, 0
		DropAreaObject.Object.scrollIntoView
		DropAreaX = DropAreaObject.GetROProperty("abs_x")
		DropAreaY = DropAreaObject.GetROProperty("abs_y")
		dr.DragAndDrop FilePosx, FilePosY, DropAreaX, DropAreaY, LEFT_MOUSE_BUTTON
		Set dr = Nothing
		Set ctlr = Nothing
	End If
	Set fso = Nothing
End Sub

Working Sample

SystemUtil.Run("https://tineye.com")
Wait(5)
Set DragArea = Browser("openurl:=https://tineye.com").Page("url:=https://tineye.com").WebEdit("type:=text", "name:=url", "html tag:=INPUT", "index:=0")
DragItemFromWindowsExplorerToIe "C:\Users\Public\Pictures\Sample Pictures\Koala.jpg", DragArea

Load Comments