how to send capital letters to another window?

I'm able to search through the windows and find the one I need (Win XP), and I'm able to send keystrokes / letters to another window. However, since the virtual keycodes don't distinguish between upper and lower case, I'm stuck as to how to send upper case letters to another window from my app (i.e. a window that is not part of my app). I have tried using the keybd_event() function to set caps lock which seems to be doing *something*, but there isn't any rhyme nor reason to when it actually decides to set the caps lock...I presume it is done in parallel, so I tried calling sleep() for a sec to make sure it has time to get through, but that isn't working either...how can I go about doing this?

thanks!

Try to use SendInput API and send both VK_SHIFT and the letter you want to.

Thanks victor --

I actually have it working with keybd_event, however, there is a strange synchronization issue where it does not work if the window is not in the foreground. If the window has focus, all is well...? Any idea why?

The keybd_event function acts just as if you had pressed the corresponding keys on the keyboard. Thus, if the window you want to send to is not in focus, the keystrokes will not reach it.

Thanks for your response calc0000 -

The problem I'm having isn't that the keystrokes don't make it, it's the synchronization of when the caps lock is on and off vs what they are supposed to be. In other words, the sequence of events I have now looks like this:

turn on caps lock
print letter
turn off caps lock

print a bunch of letters

turn on caps lock
print letter
turn off caps lock


...given the above I would expect the output string to look something like:

"T....sdfsdfsd...bunch of letters.....Y"

as you can see the first and last letters are caps...instead what I see is:

"T....sDFSDFSD...BUNCH OF LETTERS....Y"

...as you can see the first "s" is still lower case as it should be. This is why I started putting pauses in the code to see if the caps lock just needed more time to switch on, but I'm waiting over a second and it doesn't work. That's when I realized it was working only when the window was in focus.

Is the problem just that the window won't receive the acknowledgement of the caps lock being turned on until it is given focus? If so, then why does one of the letters properly display, but the rest are wrong? Strange.

Actually, this gives me another idea. I'll try setting the focus to the window programmatically -- can anyone remind me how to do that? I know, I know, look it up.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by andersod2

Actually, this gives me another idea. I'll try setting the focus to the window programmatically -- can anyone remind me how to do that? I know, I know, look it up.

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HWND SetFocus(HWND hWnd) and HWND GetFocus(VOID) could be what you're looking for.

With regards
Programartist

Thanks Program Artist.

Unfortunately, although setting the focus works, it's not solving my problem. It kind of makes sense that Windows would not want the setting of the caps lock to affect characters being sent to an unfocused window, however, I can't seem to override this...I will attempt victor's original suggestion to use sendinput...

Thanks