Determining Serial Ports available on Windows

[tjm167us]

Greetings,
Courtesy of hutchfx (from 6 years ago), I found two methods for determining the available COM ports on a windows machine in livecode: One uses brute force (attempting to open each one and relying on the error you get if it doesn't exist), and the other, queries of the windows registry.

Code: Select all

put queryRegistry("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM") into field "my field"

Querying the registry is definitely the way to go, but I can't for the life of me figure out why it's not working. I can view this path using RegEdit, but when I look at the response of the query, I get nothing!
Could there be some sort of administrative lock-down that would prevent LiveCode from accessing the Windows registry? I tried to run LiveCode as an administrator to test this, but with no luck.

Help, please!
Tom

[FourthWorld]

What is the type of the value? Is it a string?

[tjm167us]

Hi Richard,
Nearest I can tell it is a string (although I'm really unfamiliar with this whole windows registry business. The example in the LiveCode docs for the function queryRegistry is:

Code: Select all

put  queryRegistry("HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.rev\") into msg

This works as expected putting "RevolutionStack" into msg which is the data from the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.rev\ key.

The data for the serial com ports is also human readable and looks like:
COM4
COM22
etc.

Thanks,
Tom

[FourthWorld]

What happens if you take off the trailing "\"?

[tjm167us]

Hi Richard,
If you remove the "\" from the LiveCode example, it stops working. However, adding a "\" after SERIALCOMM doesn't work. In fact, I methodically changed the path in the following ways:
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM\"
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\"
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP"
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\"
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE"
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\"
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE"

Only the very last one in this list responded, and it did with "no key".

[FourthWorld]

Testing here, with confirmation from a friend on the email discussion list, this appears to be a bug. I've submitted a report for it - you can add your email address to the CC list to follow progress:
http://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=19970

[FourthWorld]

One of the email list members, Mike Bonner, offered this workaround for now:

One can use the shell to do this.. *get* shell("reg query
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\KeyboardClass")

I used KeyboardClass because SERIALCOMM doesn't exist for me. (windows 10)
but at least when i tried it I got back a helpful message telling me that
it doesn't exist.

http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-l ... 38652.html

[tjm167us]

Richard and Mike,
Thanks a lot for taking the time to look into this - The solution works great. Below is the final implementation to extract the data portion of the registry:

Code: Select all

   
    //This is a workaround for using the queryRegistry command (bug was reported)
   //Must be VERY careful doing this as different versions of windows have a different location for the serial comm ports.
   put shell("reg query HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM") into tempVar
   
   repeat for each line tLine in tempVar
      if the number of words in tLine>1 then
         put the last word of tLine & return after theAnswer
      end if
   end repeat
   put theAnswer into msg

For the benefit of others that aren't familiar with the "reg query" command in windows, I have attached the usage of it to this post. You can get this information yourself by typing the following into the command prompt:

Code: Select all

reg query /?

[mwieder]

I just checked this on a real Windows system (not a vm) and I also don't have a SERIALCOMM sub-key.

It's been a while since I've had to work with a M$ system, but my recollection is that the queryRegistry() function needs a parameter that is an exact path to a key endpoint, i.e., you can't just say "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM", you'd also need either a trailing "\" to return the default value for that key or a trailing "\Com1" or similar to get down to where there aren't any more subkeys.

The listRegistry() function should tell you whether or not there are subkeys.