How to bring my application to the front?

delphi delphi-xe2
Mawg says reinstate Monica picture Mawg says reinstate Monica · Oct 18, 2012 · Viewed 36.3k times · Source

I know all the reasons why it is a bad idea. I dislike it if an application steals input focus, but this is for purely personal use and I want it to happen; it will not disturb anything.

(for the curious: I am running unit tests in NetBeans, which generate a log file. When my background application sees the log file's timestamp change I want it to parse the log file and come to the front to show the results).

This question did not help, nor did googling. It seems that BringToFront() hasn't worked for a long time and I can't find any alternative that does.

Any ideas?

Answer

Sertac Akyuz picture Sertac Akyuz · Oct 18, 2012

Here's something simple that seems to work, tested with multiple boxes consisting of XP, Server2003, Vista, Server2008, W7. Test application ran with a standard (or admin) account, stole the input focus from notepad while writing in the foreground.

var
  Input: TInput;
begin
  ZeroMemory(@Input, SizeOf(Input));
  SendInput(1, Input, SizeOf(Input)); // don't send anyting actually to another app..
  SetForegroundWindow(Handle);

You can tweak it further f.i. for a minimized app or such if required.

Related questions

Why does CreateProcess give error 193 (%1 is not a valid Win32 app)

The code below fails to start documents. I get error 193 (%1 is not a valid Win32 app). Starting executables work fine. The files are properly associated, they start the corresponding app when double clicked. I have searched SO and elsewhere for …

Read More
Using Case Statement with String

Say i have a string 'SomeName' and wanted the values return in a case statement. Can this bedone? Can strings be used in a case statement like so Case 'SomeName' of 'bobby' : 2; 'tommy' :19; 'somename' :4000; else showmessage('Error'); end;

Read More
Delphi VCL styles tutorial - how to change the style at runtime

Is there a good VCL Styles tutorial where we see how to dynamically (in run time) load/change the style ? This should work with Delphi XE2 and up, since XE2 is the first version with VCL Styles.

Read More