Opening an .exe, then keystroke

[librisrouge]

Ok, I may be in over my head but my work asked me to try, I asked them to pay me, and they said ok...so here I am. Mind you I only have 1.5 years of programing experience (.5 with c++) from about 6 years ago so I'm relearning quite a bit to do this.

I'm trying to make a simple program that opens a closed database (via it's .exe) we have and goes through a predetermined set of keyboard commands. This will eventually be expanded to have the commands influenced by what is in a .xls file once I'm more familiar with the coding needed for .xls manipulation.

I can open the .exe using a system command, as shown:

system ("S:\\Storm.exe"); //Opens Storm

After this though the program waits until storm is closes to do anything else. This kinda stops me from having it go through what I want it to. I've tried looking into shellexecute but I can't figure out how to make that work, plus I can't find the commands so have c++ do manual keyboard inputs.

Bear in mind that I know this is a round about way of doing this but storm doesn't allow more direct ways and my boss doesn't want this to neccessarily make things fast but to replace people from doing it.

[nin2246]

I never done anything like that before, but I read something about "#include<allegro>" It allows the user to input keyboard commands. I believe you have to download it and add it as an addon.

http://alleg.sourceforge.net//index.html

[hanst99]

Ignore above. Allegro is nice to have, but it's overkill if you just want to read key input, and it doesn't help you at all if you want to simulate keypresses which sounds like what you want.

PS: nin, allegro is not an "addon". It's a library. Familiarize yourself with the proper terminology if you want people to understand what you are talking about.

Back to topic: If you're on Windows, you'd probably have to use WinAPI for this. At least I don't know any other way. Try to work with that a little, and see if you can get anywhere.

PS: Do you really want send key commands to the exe, or do you want to execute commands in the data base? Because if it's a database there is probably a C/C++ API for directly executing commands on it.