Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I minimize or hide an HTA for 30 seconds?
— MF
Hey, MF. You know, with the possible exception of baseball, the Scripting Guy who writes this column rarely claims to know much about anything. And for good reason: every time he thinks he knows something, well ….
Take your question, for example. Minimize or hide an HTA? No problem, he thought. After all, HTA’s have a property named windowStyle that can be used to configure an HTA to run minimized, maximized, or in a normal window. And if that’s not good enough for you, then you can simply set the Visible property of the HTA to False. Take your pick.
So, sure, take your pick; just don’t expect either choice to solve your problem. As it turns out, HTAs don’t have a Visible property, something this Scripting Guy would have realized had he bothered to think about this question for a second. As for the windowStyle property, well, that property does exist; however, it can be configured only at startup time. After the HTA is up and running you can no longer change the windowStyle property; that means you can’t easily switch between, say, a minimized window and a normal window.
Uh-oh.
In other words, this Scripting Guy is no genius. (Well, the Scripting Editor thinks he is. But he’s really not.)
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Editor’s Note: We’re not sure where the Scripting Guy got the impression anyone thinks he’s a genius, let alone the Scripting Editor. Could it have been the baffled looks, or the comments like “What are you talking about?” and “Are you out of your mind?” We’re not sure, but he’s on vacation this week and won’t see this, so if it makes him happy we’ll let him remain in his own imaginary little world. And we’ll know that the next time we say to him “Do you have a brain?” he’s taking it as a compliment. |
On the other hand, there is one advantage to being dumb: you’re not smart enough to know when you’re licked. Maybe we can’t minimize or hide an HTA, but we can do this:
<html><SCRIPT Language=”VBScript”>
Dim intLeft Dim intTop
Sub HideWindow intLeft = window.screenLeft intTop = window.screenTop window.moveTo -2000,-2000 idTimer = window.setTimeout(“ShowWindow”, 5000, “VBScript”) End Sub
Sub ShowWindow window.moveTo intLeft,intTop window.clearTimeout(idTimer) End Sub </SCRIPT>
<body> <input type=”button” value=”Hide Window” onClick=”HideWindow”> </body> </html>
If you run this script and click the button labeled Hide Window, the HTA will disappear. However, that’s not because we’ve minimized the window or because we’ve made the application invisible; instead, we’ve simply moved the HTA clear off the screen. After a five-second pause (a time interval you can modify as needed), we restore the window to its previous location. Not bad, huh?
Let’s see if we can figure out how this thing works. To begin with, the body of the HTA contains just one thing — a single button labeled Hide Window:
<input type=”button” value=”Hide Window” onClick=”HideWindow”>
Click this button, and you’ll run a subroutine named HideWindow. That subroutine looks like this:
Sub HideWindow
intLeft = window.screenLeft
intTop = window.screenTop
window.moveTo -2000,-2000
idTimer = window.setTimeout(“ShowWindow”, 5000, “VBScript”)
End Sub
As you can see, we don’t really do much in this HTA. We start out by assigning values to a pair of global variables named intLeft and intTop:
intLeft = window.screenLeft intTop = window.screenTop
What we’re doing here is making a note of the upper (window.screenTop) left-hand (window.screenLeft) corner of the HTA window. Why do we do that? That’s easy: by knowing the location of the upper left-hand corner we’ll be able to restore the window to its current spot. After grabbing this information we then move the window off the screen:
window.moveTo -2000,-2000
How do we know this moves the window off the screen? Well, the upper left-hand corner of the screen has the coordinates 0, 0. A window with coordinates -2000, -2000 is going to be way off the screen.
With the window no longer visible this would probably be the spot where you would run whatever code you need the HTA to run. Instead of putting some phony-baloney code in here we simply set a timer that pauses the HTA for 5 seconds (5,000 milliseconds) and then calls a subroutine named ShowWindow:
idTimer = window.setTimeout(“ShowWindow”, 5000, “VBScript”)
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Note. Did someone say they didn’t understand how the timer-setting code works? If so, take a look at this Hey, Scripting Guy! column for more information. |
And what does the ShowWindow subroutine do? Actually, it does two things. First, it moves the window back to its original location:
window.moveTo intLeft,intTop
And then it clears the timer:
window.clearTimeout(idTimer)
Do we really need to clear the timer? Well, it’s a pretty good idea; otherwise every 5 seconds the timer is going to fire and move the window back to its original position.
Give this a try, MF, and see if it helps; we think it will. And that’s a good point: imagine what a cool solution we could have come up with had we actually know what we were doing.
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