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Detecting Idle Time in Delphi

I have an app that needs to detect when the whole system has not received any input from keyboard or mouse for a few minutes. I've found some very complicated hooking examples online which involve DLLs and some others that simply don't work. Can anyone suggest a straight forward way of doing this.

Ferruccio Accalai

what about using GetLastInputInfo?
edit: you need it systemwide, so this function can't help you :(

function SecondsIdle: DWord;
var
  liInfo: TLastInputInfo;
begin
  liInfo.cbSize := SizeOf(TLastInputInfo);
  GetLastInputInfo(liInfo);
  Result := (GetTickCount - liInfo.dwTime) DIV 1000;
end;

procedure TForm1.Timer1Timer(Sender: TObject);
begin
  Caption := Format('System IDLE last %d seconds', [SecondsIdle]);
end;

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ChrisJonesLycos

ASKER

The MSDN documentation says that that's for your own window only, not system wide.

Ferruccio Accalai

No wait, it says literaly "GetLastInputInfo does not provide system-wide user input information across all running sessions. Rather, GetLastInputInfo provides session-specific user input information for only the session that invoked the function"
It speaks about sessions, not "window"

ChrisJonesLycos

ASKER

Is that not the same? I'll try out some code and see what result I get.

Ferruccio Accalai

For a session I mean a User session. If you have some user remotely connected that's a separate session I guess. It's like it works into HKCU instead of HKLM
Anyway, everywhere I read, the suggested approach for a system idle detection is this.

ChrisJonesLycos

ASKER

I've requested that this question be closed as follows:

Accepted answer: 0 points for ChrisJonesLycos's comment #37782640

for the following reason:

Cool. You're right, code works! Session obviously doesn't mean just your own app, it's definitely system wide. Many thanks.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Ferruccio Accalai

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ChrisJonesLycos

ASKER

I accepted your solution. Not sure what happened.