PythonRemoteServer running in background on remote machine, can't interact with Windows desktop applications

[anujteotia]

Hi All,

I'm running PythonRemoteServer on remote machine as a background process, It is unable to interact with any windows desktop application. When I open it in cmd manually, it can interact with GUI and execute the test case.

[pekkaklarck]

How do you try to interact with the app? Notice that questions like this are generally better asked on our Slack or other such support forum listed at robotframework.org. If the problem turns out to be caused by a bug in the remote server, then that should obviously be reported here.

[stylpe]

If by "background process" you mean as a Windows service, that's a well known limitation, they cannot interact with the user's desktop/session directly.

[anujteotia]

@stylpe that is exactly what I meant. If this is a known limitation, then I'll try to find an alternate solution for it.

[stylpe]

Do that :) Here's a reference btw: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/27517/is-there-any-workaround-in-win10-to-allow-service

Two options that I know of that you can consider are Task Scheduler (which can run things elevated) or some kind of remoting with Powershell or similar or lower level APIs to start the server on demand.