How do I automate SAP GUI with c#

Question

I would like to automate an SAP GUI window using the C# language. I am able to do it in VBScript but code reuse is horrible. Besides Id like to use threading instead of havi

Answer 1

It is very important here to understand what UI Automation can do and what its limitations are. It was designed to automate a user interface's capabilities. You can click buttons, enter text in a textbox, move windows, etcetera, whatever a user can do using the mouse and keyboard.

What it can not do is bridge the tall wall that the operating system puts up between processes. A wall that prevents a process from accessing the memory of another process. This is a very important security and safety feature. It for one prevents a process from accessing data that should be private to a process. Like a password. And for another it stops a crashing process from affecting other processes that run on the machine. You can kill a process with Task Manager and everything keeps motoring along happily as though nothing happened.

A consequence of this is that creating a SAPConnection object in your program is a connection that only your program can use. There is no mechanism to somehow pass this object to another process with UI Automation. At best you could use the data you retrieve from the connection to affect what buttons you click.

The kind of process interop that would allow sharing data between processes is well supported in .NET. Low-level approaches are socket and named pipes, high-level are Remoting and WCF. Older programs have COM Automation support, Office is a good example of that. That however requires two to tango, both programs must be written to take advantage of it.

So if you are trying to automate an existing SAP application and this app does not otherwise explicitly support automation, the kind that an Office program supports, then you are pretty much stuck with just filling text boxes and clicking buttons.