RE: tricking another program with xywrite as if keyboard?

["Knouse, Charles" Charles.Knouse@xxxxxxxx]

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-xywrite@xxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-xywrite@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Distefano
Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 9:22 PM
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: tricking another program with xywrite as if keyboard?


Reply to note from "Knouse, Charles" 
Wed, 8 Apr 2009 18:55:42 -0500

Charles:

> I need to trick Avatar into THINKING (a hopeless goal, of
> course;) that it is receiving keyboard input....heh heh heh.

I'm not entirely sure what it is you want to do. First of all, what
is Avatar?

*****Carl, thanks. Avatar is an ancient, dreadful, medical records program that somebody talked the
state of Nebraska into many years ago. We need a way to take an old whatever (H&P, etc.) and,
using headings as search objects, highlight text and paste it into Avator, using a macro rather than
a human. Avatar itself has no capability for importing and has no macro language, AND what is even
worse, when the transcriptionist is working on dictation, the transcriptionist cannot call up the
last dictation - already inputted - of that type, FROM Avatar, which would make life much easier for
everyone.

*****What med records used to do, which worked nicely, was to keep records in Microsoft Word, and
then just call up the previous dictation and cut and paste whatever changes the physician wished to
make into the old document, and then resave it as a new document, an exceedingly efficient way to do
things. MR can still do this, but to then get it into Avatar currently requires an tedious and
extremely time-wasting manual drudgery (enter xywrite, to da!!!) I haven't a clue how to program in
Microsoft Word, and distrust Word anyway, knowing who created it, but I did at one time know XPL
quite well; so rather than try to write a macro in word to automate getting these files into Avatar,
I thought it might be more efficient to convert the word files to xywrite (purchase the app for
that) and then use XPL to automate getting them into Avatar.

******the reason to trick Avatar into thinking it is receiving keystrokes is so that Avatar can be
manipulated by XPL to do all that cutting and pasting (Avatar will not accept a whole document; it
has fields which must be filled in a piece at a time), which would otherwise requires thousands of
human hours (or a few billion chimps and all the time left to our solar system)


> Is there a way, running XPL in xywrite, to send text (and
> keyboard commands) from xywrite into Avatar as if it were
> keyboard input?

Certainly you can use the XyWrite command line or XPL to send
keystrokes to another running Windows program. First, though, you'll
need to get hold of Robert Holmgren's GoXy utility (download at
http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/GoXy.EXE), and get familiar with it
(documentation at http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/Go.HTM). With
GoXy.EXE in the DOS Path, you can issue issue a XyWrite command such
as:

do/nv/z goxy.exe "firefox" /key(ctsh)h

Read: Switch to Firefox and open the browser history (Ctrl-Shift-H).
(Omit "/nv/z" if you're running Xy3.)

Is that the sort of thing you're after?

********Yes, I think that will probably give me the tool I need, and I can happily start writing
XPL, thank you very much, MUCH APPRECIATED.

Very Best Regards,

Charles
Charles Knouse, D.O.
Interim Medical Director
BSDC, Beatrice, NE

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx