autohotkey: how to set up a watchdog - autohotkey

Question

My AHK script's expected run time is somewhere between 5 minutes and 25 minutes depending on the events. And it is mostly doing screen scraping off of a browser, searching for patterns and taking actions (by clicking certain zones on the screen) accordingly. And terminating the browser session when all is done. And I scheduled it to run every hour from windows task scheduler.
My problem is, when there is a network problem or my workstation CPU is having a senior moment, the time allow for the web page to load gets to be insufficient (usually around 15 seconds and it is not feasible to make it longer as contents may change in 30 seconds) Or in the middle of the process something may get hung.
If such a thing happens, I want the AHK script to exit and just before exiting, I want it to terminate all browser sessions (chrome in this particular case)
So far, I am unable to come up with a "single script" solution.
My current state is to start a script which monitors the contents of a file every 30 minutes, and if the contents haven't changed from the last time, open up a new google chrome session and send Shift-Ctrl-Q key sequence to close all instances of chrome. Meanwhile, my main script, updates the same file upon completion with a number different than the previous value in it and it is unique. Deficiency of this approach: I don't know how to kill the other AHK script (hung one) without killing this watchdog script.
And my ultimate desire is to build this functionality, into the main script, which is susceptible to getting hung.
My main script
send #r
send chrome.exe http://myURL{enter}
mousemove 200,200
send ^a
send ^c
;
; using a series of IfInString commands
; determine the condition
; then use mousemove, x, y and mouseclick, l
; commands, do my deed
filedelete, c:\mydir\myfile
fileappend, newnumber, c:\mydir\myfile
exitapp
My watchdog script
loop ; forever
{
; old content is stored in variable PREV
fileread, newval, c:\mydir\myfile
if (newval = PREV)
{
send #r
send chrome.exe
sleep 10000 ; wait for chrome window to pop up
send ^+Q
; I need a way to stop my hung AHK script here but don't know how
}
else
{
PREV = %newval%
sleep 1800000 ; sleep 30 minutes
}
} ; end of loop
f10::exitapp ; when I need to stop watchdog
of course these are not the actual scripts. Just to give you an idea. Otherwise, there are lots of waiting around for pages to load etc. But gist of it is there.
Thank you for your help in advance

Answer 1

I have provided some AutoHotkey code blocks that should resolve the issues you describe.
I would try and write both scripts, so that if both scripts were terminated,
it would be possible to do some checks and resume as if nothing
had happened, i.e. add in more flexibility.
I personally almost never use SetTimer, I just use loops with Sleep,
I don't think it would help improve the script in this case.
I have found that for scripts that have hung, but for where there is no error message to state that they have terminated,
you can retrieve the hWnd (window handle) and PID (process ID) and thus terminate them.
Some of the tasks you describe may be achieved more easily by using UrlDownloadToFile
or WinHttpRequest (see examples on the forum) to download webpages, and then by parsing the html.
Other tasks may be more easily accomplished by using Internet Explorer with COM (Component Object Model),
to query/manipulate web elements in a live webpage.
-
;to launch Chrome and wait for it to open (with an optional delay afterwards)
;if the window is not seen within 60 seconds, ErrorLevel is set to 1 and action can be taken
Run, "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" "https://www.google.com/"
WinWaitActive, ahk_class Chrome_WidgetWin_1, , 60
if ErrorLevel
{
MsgBox error ;put code here
}
else
{
Sleep 10000
;put code here
}
;to launch Internet Explorer and wait for it to open (with an optional delay afterwards)
Run, "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" "https://www.google.com/"
WinWaitActive, ahk_class IEFrame
Sleep 10000
;to terminate a script
DetectHiddenWindows, On
vPathScript = %A_ScriptDir%\my script.ahk
WinGet, hWnd, ID, %vPathScript% - AutoHotkey v ahk_class AutoHotkey
IfWinExist, ahk_id %hWnd%
{
WinGet, vPID, PID, ahk_id %hWnd%
Process, Close, %vPID%
}

Answer 2

Process Watchdog using:
- 2 local PC's with shared folders
- 3 ahk Scripts
PC-1 ahk Process script (loops forever)
auto start at windows startup
LOOP
put a WD file on PC-2
run some process
wait some time
go to LOOP
PC-1 ahk WD-1 script
auto start at windows startup (loops forever)
if initial startup set Counter and put WD file in local shared folder
LOOP
wait some time
if local WD file doesn't exist decrement Counter
if Counter = Zero Send Email
if local WD file exists reset Counter and delete local WD file
go to LOOP
PC-2 ahk WD-2 script
auto start at windows startup (loops forever)
if initial startup set Counter and put WD file in local shared folder
LOOP
wait some time
if local WD file doesn't exist decrement Counter
if Counter = Zero Send Email
if local WD file exists reset Counter and delete local WD File
put WD file on PC-1
go to loop
Basic Failure Scenarios:
Process script Fails ... PC-1 and PC-2 WD scripts will send emails
PC-1 Fails ... PC-2 WD script will send email
PC-2 Fails ... PC-1 WD script will send email