Hi Mark,

Matt already replied but I thought I would give more info.

On Oct 23, 2010, at 10:04 PM, Mark Rada wrote:

Hi,

I've been trying to play with using the Accessibility API to do some automated testing.

From what I have researched, I have to use some C functions that often need a reference passed to the them.

I am at a loss when trying to deal with Pointer objects. I've tried playing with them and googling it, but I just cannot figure out how to turn a pointer into a more useful type or to get what I want out of them.

For example, I can start like this:

framework 'Cocoa'

unless AXAPIEnabled() # only works if I include the parenthesis
puts 'Please enable Access for Assistive Devices first'
exit 2
end

That's expected, in Ruby methods starting with a capital letter must be called with explicit parentheses, otherwise they are interpreted as constants.

mail              = NSRunningApplication.runningApplicationsWithBundleIdentifier('com.apple.Mail').first
mail_object = AXUIElementCreateApplication mail.processIdentifier

names = Pointer.new :object

AXUIElementCopyAttributeNames mail_object, names


But then how do I get the values out of the names pointer? For reference, I found the functions in AXUIElement.h.


It looks like AXUIElementCopyAttributeNames returns a CFArray by reference. So your pointer object is properly created, to retrieve the array after the call you just use

  array = names[0]

Then, it should behave like a normal Ruby array.

Laurent