How Actual Tools Program Selects a Proper Rule to Apply

The instant a particular window appears the Actual Tools program's Control Center performs the following actions:

• scans sequentially (from top to bottom) the list of Specific Settings rules in the order defined internally and tries to match the window with one of the sets of Target Window criteria appearing in the Target Window pane. Note that it skips the disabled (i.e. unchecked) rules while scanning. Upon locating a rule that is both enabled and matches the criteria for that particular window, this is considered the appropriate target window, and the whole process stops. If the Control Center scans all the way to the end of the list and an appropriate rule is not found the program proceeds to the following step...

• checks to see if the Default Settings rule is enabled (i.e. checked).

  If the answer is "no" then the whole process stops, and the window is left unchanged.

  If the answer is "yes" then the Control Center scans sequentially the Exclusions list and tries to match the window with one of the sets of Target Window criteria appearing in the Target Window pane, just below the list of rules. Note that it skips the disabled (i.e. unchecked) rules while scanning. Upon locating a rule that is both enabled and matches the criteria for that particular window, this is considered the appropriate target window, the process stops, and the window is left unchanged. If the Control Center scans all the way to the end of the list, and an appropriate rule is not found - the program proceeds to the last step...

• the Default Settings rule is applied to the window, and the process terminates completely.

During the scanning process the Actual Tools program's Control Center checks the Target Window criteria utilizing the following rules:

• it considers enabled criteria only

• it considers a certain criterion as disabled if the criterion is enabled (i.e. its check box is checked) but no value is specified (i.e. the related edit box is empty)

• it considers all the criteria for a potential target window as a whole: if the scan fails to meet any single criterion of several criteria then the test fails completely

• it always tests the Window Class and the Program values for a substring match

• it tests the Window Caption value according to a chosen method