UI Inspector to find Windows Element Properties – ACCELQ

Windows Element Inspector

ACCELQ Windows Element Inspector helps to inspect Windows UI element properties. These properties are helpful to formulate Selectors for the elements used in the Action logic.

You can download the Inspector from the link here.

Capturing Element Properties

ACCELQ supports 3 types of element properties for Windows UI:

UIA
MSAA
Win32

In the UI Inspector, click on the "Capture" button and hover on the element/window area you are interested to capture properties. Keep hovering for a few seconds until the area is highlighted with a red color border.

ACCELQ will analyze the element and print the properties in the Inspector panel.

These properties are displayed in 3 columns for each of the supported framework types. Each set of these properties includes the following sections:

The first section displays the element's own attributes.
The second section displays the attributes of the parent (window).
The third section displays attributes of child elements within the inspected area. This section is available only for the UIA framework.

Selecting appropriate attributes for element identification

Choose a subset of meaningful properties from a framework type that may be most appropriate for the captured element. Each attribute is presented as a key-value pair in the Inspector. The following table shows the most common properties used in element identification.

Framework type	Widely used attributes
UIA	UIA framework properties work for most of cases. control_type, class_name, and title are commonly used attributes. auto_id helps when no unique match attributes are found. child_text helps to get element text.
MSAA	role_name, name, and value are commonly used attributes
WIN32	class_name, title, rich_text are commonly used attributes

Here are some additional tips to help you choose the right attributes:

While trying to identify a Window element, look for properties under the "Parents" section. Here are some common attribute combinations:
- UIA: selectors with control_type="Window" and title with expected text
- MSAA: selectors with role_name=Window and name with expected text
Check whether element-related textual data exists in the selector. For example, if you are capturing the notepad element, then as you can see, UIA properties are not going to serve. It does not show the text that is expected of this element.

If the title of a window is dynamic, you may use a regular expression pattern with an attribute named: title_re.

For example, to select a notepad window whose title is in the format “<file name> - Notepad” you can use the selector

title_re=“^.*Notepad$” (means: ends with "Notepad")

Windows Element Inspector

Capturing Element Properties

Selecting appropriate attributes for element identification

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