IA2008 - JUnit/GUIAutomationFixture problem/documentation

[ConorCunningham]

I am attempting to run the JUnit example provided with the installer in BasicProjectAutomation.java. I am attempting to use this technology to write basic functional tests against our InstallAnywhere 2008 installer.

To date, I have been able to get the Installer to start and I have been able to wait for panels and navigate through the installer UI with only minor issues. I'm hoping that there is more documentation about the interface so that I can deal with the harder problems.

Specifically, I'd like to know how to deal with modal dialog box errors.

I also found that GUIAutomationFixture.type("my string") changes spaces to zeros (0). I can work around this with pressKey(VK_SPACE), but it's annoying.

Has anyone else successfully gotten this path to work? Any insight appreciated. The modal dialog box issue may be a deal-breaker for me if I can't find some workaround.

Thanks,

Conor

[ConorCunningham]

Well, I eventually determined that I hadn't passed enough pressEnter() calls, so I think the modal dialog box problem is at least solved.

I would like to be able to _read_ various values from the panels and such. So far I haven't seen any ability to do that. So, I'll augment my question with that - is it possible to get a list of the controls and their values.

So, I'd like to look at the error message I get back and compare it to what I expect, for example. Right now, I don't see a way to do that.

Thanks,
Conor

[ConorCunningham]

Seems like I'm the first one to try this, so I will post my findings...

There wasn't an easy way to get the set of events that get sent discovered, so I found a way to discover them :). I see the following events:

window.activated
panel.shown

There may be others. I don't see a ton of information that is useful to the remote side about "discovering" state.

So, this approach to automated GUI testing may be acceptable for some positive use case tests.

I have found that some of my custom panels in my company's installer are not coming through, and we're investigating that problem now. Hopefully this is something we can fix on our side.

I would love to get a confirmed list of dialogs or any information about whether there is more information I can pass back through the interface that is a part of the IA product.

Otherwise I will likely revert to using response files to test things...

[ConorCunningham]

We ended up building our own logic for the custom panels to call the debugging port.

Now we're trying to work through what appears to be race conditions in the queue processing logic. We're trying building our own client at this point.

Conor

[ConorCunningham]

The timing issues associated with the robot-based approach ultimately turned out to make this unworkable, especially when running on virtualized hardware. We had random timeouts all over the place when the machine had load on other VMs.