I'm developing an automated test suite for an application which uses some text fields which are, however, rather recognized as SwfObjects. As part of the automation, I'd like to type a person's name into one of those objects. Naturally, I'm using the Type method as it's the only one available for a SwfObject.
Sometimes, if I do SwfObject("edit_field").Type "Joe Smith" the application often glitches and QTP manages to fill the field in with a structurally similar but yet different string instead, such as "Jo Smith" or "Joe Snith". This is rather nondeterministic and the results produced can vary significantly. Sometimes, the editable field gets filled with the correct text, but most of the times it doesn't. No amount of Wait or WaitProperty(visible) managed to solve this so far. Has anyone come across this issue before and if so, could you offer some insight into solving it? It might be worth mentioning that the application most likely queries a DB in the background whenever someone types something into that text field.
Many thanks,
Paul.
Hi Paul Try this out..
set keyboard = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
SwfObject("edit_field").Click
keyboard.SendKeys "Joe Smith"
Related
I am creating in which a user can say an address (for further processing). An address can be anything from "New York" to "123 First Avenue Washington" to "Seattle Harbor". Basically like something you can enter at Google Maps - it will recognize more or less everything :)
So now of course comes the problem on how to create a custom slot for this? LITERAL is deprecated PLUS I am working on a German language skill.
Should I actually try to fill the 50,000 lines I got available for a custom skill with as many enumerations of addresses as I can come up with? I'm afraid that even if I go down that road, Alexa will still try to map any input that's not in that list to one that is - and thereby rendering my skill a bit mood :(
Thanks for any advise!
As you suggest, using a custom slot with 50K sample addresses wouldn't really work. Something as complicated as an address really needs a built-in slot type, and there is one for US skills:
https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/docs/built-in-intent-ref/slot-type-reference#postaladdress
But you noted that you are targeting a German language skill and as far as I know there isn't a German language or address version of the above built-in slot yet.
The fact that they have done it for US suggests that they will add it for Germany at some point, but counting on that is risky, of course, so you are in a difficult position. In the mean-time I would suggest you go to the feature request space and add a request for a German version of the above:
I am new to Gherkin and BDD.
We are doing BDD regression tests with Squish.
Our application is very complex - similar to a flight simulator.
Now I ask myself how to write the tests in Gherkin.
As we have a large number of variables as preconditions to a certain situation I would normally put a lot of
Given some precondition
And some other precondition
into my tests.
My natural feeling is that I should avoid this because it would make things unnecessarily complex.
Is there a rule of thumb for how many preconditions there should be?
Should I try to reduce it to only one?
The general rule is to have as few as possible while still making the tests useful. How many that is will depend on the audience for your scenarios.
If you are using gherkin scenarios for actual BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) then you will have to write the scenarios in such a way that your stakeholders can make sense of them. If this means that you have to write many Given, And, And steps then that is the way it has to be. If it means that you can put several of these steps into one more general set up step then that is better.
If you are using the Gherkin scenarios only as a way of automating tests then do whatever is good for your dev team. The rule about having as few steps as possible comes from trying to make sure everyone, technical and non technical understands what is meant by the scenario (i.e. that they are as clear AND concise as possible. If it is only the technical team that needs to understand it then as above you can use many steps if that is what is necessary for your team to understand it, or you can use fewer steps that contain more code.
For your case of having a very complex system to get into the correct state for testing, I wouldn't be worried about having may set up steps, so long as the scenarios you end up with are clear and as short as possible. There wouldn't be any point in having a smaller neater scenario that no one really understood without looking at the code!
When you are writing scenarios, you can make the code behind the steps do whatever you need to set the application in a state that is needed for testing. Thre is a pretty good article explaining the point here.
I find that if you can be more descriptive in your steps, then your tests will make more sense when you need to go back to reference them. If your steps are just Given, click, click, click, Then .. you can easily lose track of the point of the test. Your tests should be about system behaviors not step by step instructions for using the system.
So as far as preconditions are concerned. You need to do whatever it takes to get the application in the state that you wish to test.
Gherkin is a Business Readable, Domain Specific Language created especially for behavior descriptions.
Gherkin serves two purposes: serving as your project’s documentation and automated tests. Gherkin’s grammar is defined in the Treetop grammar that is part of the Cucumber codebase.
To understand Gherkin in a better way, please take a look at simple scenario mentioned below:
Feature: As a existing facebook user, I am able to post a birthday greeting on any other existing user's facebook page
Scenario: Verify that Joe Joseph can post a birthday greeting on Sam Joseph's facebook page
Given Joe Joseph is an existing facebook user
Given Sam Joseph is an existing facebook user
Given Joe Joseph is on login page of facebook
Given Joe Joseph logs into his facebook account
When Joe Joseph opens Sam Joseph's facebook page
And Joe Joseph writes "Happy Birthday Sam" on Sam Joseph's facebook page
And Joe Joseph clicks on Post button
Then Joe Joseph verifies that "Happy Birthday Sam" is successfully posted on Sam Joseph's facebook page
In the above scenario, all the statements that starts with "Given" are my preconditions.
So, as far as precondictions are concerned, you can use as many preconditions which is required for the test.
Gherkin is the language that Cucumber understands. It is a Business Readable, Domain Specific Language that lets you describe software’s behaviour without detailing how that behaviour is implemented More here
From above statement my understanding is. You don't need to add precondition every time as who is using scenario knows how to write and understand Gherkin language.
Here is example:
When I take login as system admin
And I click on new user
And I enter new user details
Then new user is created successful
Here I don't need to mention where I am and other precondition like URL opened or not ?
First precondition is URL opened or not.
Given I opened URL "http://www.stackoverflow.com"
And I enter system admin details
And I click on new user
When I enter new user details
Then new user is created successfully
Second Condition New User Details form have all the required field. This can be separate scenario.
Goal is tell business and team that we are testing this scenario. It is not test case. You don't need to create tons of document for testing purpose.
Like YAML or Python, Gherkin is a line-oriented language that uses indentation to define structure. Line endings terminate statements (called steps) and either spaces or tabs may be used for indentation. Finally, most lines in Gherkin start with a special keyword:
Sample
Feature: Some terse yet descriptive text of what is desired
In order to realize a named business value
As an explicit system actor
I want to gain some beneficial outcome which furthers the goal
Scenario: Some determinable business situation
Given some precondition
And some other precondition
When some action by the actor
And some other action
And yet another action
Then some testable outcome is achieved
And something else we can check happens too
Scenario: A different situation
...
The parser divides the input into features, scenarios and steps. Let’s walk through the above example:
Feature: Some terse yet descriptive text of what is desired starts the feature and gives it a title.
Scenario: Some determinable business situation starts the scenario, and contains a description of the scenario.
The next 7 lines are the scenario steps, each of which is matched to a regular expression defined elsewhere.
Scenario: A different situation starts the next scenario, and so on.
When you’re executing the feature, the trailing portion of each step (after keywords like Given, And, When, etc) is matched to a regular expression
Also note, if you have precondition like Given I opened URL "http://www.stackoverflow.com" as mentioned my #Boston. It is recomended to use it as Background.
Example
Feature: This is test feature
Background: background scenario
Given I opened URL "http://www.stackoverflow.com"
Scenario: access first senario
Given: I should see this
...
Scenario: access second scenario
Given: I should see that
...
The background will execute before every scenario.
Reference:
https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber/wiki/Gherkin
This is more of an advise / best practice question that I'm hoping someone has come across before and can give me a steer.
I need to build a web application (the client would like webforms because that's what their developers know for when i hand it over)
Essentially when the client logs in, they will pick a language then I need to replace the text for menus, input boxes etc. The client wants to add their translations and update them at any time.
Ideas I have looked at are:
Holding the translations in resource files, building an editor in to the web application and then adding attributes on the fly to my viewmodels.
Holding the translations in sql server so i have the name, language and translation as a lookup e.g. Home | French | Maison. Then on pre-render I'll scrape the screen for any controls needing translation in the menu, labels, text areas.
Does anyone know of any good examples or had the experience of doing this themselves.
I've a similar situation, and chose to store data in SQL.
Translation mistakes happen often, and you don't want to recompile or disassemble every time.
It is possible to avoid the need to republish, but I've found it just more intuitive and straightforward to maintain SQL.
Bottom line, it depends on the amount of data you have. If it's more than just a couple of keywords, it sounds like a job for SQL to me.
Edit:
In a similar question, users recommend using resources, claiming it is the standard method.
However, if your users are going to make changes to values on regular basis (not because of mistake correction, but because data actually changes), then SQL seems best fit for the job.
So I have played with the idea of making a specialized RSS-reader for some time now, but I have never gotten around to it. I have several project that could benefit from reading feeds in one way or another.
One project for this is an RSS-bot for an IRC-channel I'm on. But I havent quite wrapped my mind around how I can "mark as read" a story, so that it doesn't spit out all the stories in the feed everytime it runs.
Now, I haven't read the specs extencively yet either, so there might be some kind of unique ID I could use to mark the entry as read using a database of some kind. But is this the right way to do it?
From reading the specs for RSS 2.0 at ttp://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#hrelementsOfLtitemgt it seems each item has a GUID which you can use to know which articles have been read or not.
How should I store (and present) the text on a website intended for worldwide use, with several languages? The content is mostly in the form of 500+ word articles, although I will need to translate tiny snippets of text on each page too (such as "print this article" or "back to menu").
I know there are several CMS packages that handle multiple languages, but I have to integrate with our existing ASP systems too, so I am ignoring such solutions.
One concern I have is that Google should be able to find the pages, even for foreign users. I am less concerned about issues with processing dates and currencies.
I worry that, left to my own devices, I will invent a way of doing this which work, but eventually lead to disaster! I want to know what professional solutions you have actually used on real projects, not untried ideas! Thanks very much.
I looked at RESX files, but felt they were unsuitable for all but the most trivial translation solutions (I will elaborate if anyone wants to know).
Google will help me with translating the text, but not storing/presenting it.
Has anyone worked on a multi-language project that relied on their own code for presentation?
Any thoughts on serving up content in the following ways, and which is best?
http://www.website.com/text/view.asp?id=12345&lang=fr
http://www.website.com/text/12345/bonjour_mes_amis.htm
http://fr.website.com/text/12345
(these are not real URLs, i was just showing examples)
Firstly put all code for all languages under one domain - it will help your google-rank.
We have a fully multi-lingual system, with localisations stored in a database but cached with the web application.
Wherever we want a localisation to appear we use:
<%$ Resources: LanguageProvider, Path/To/Localisation %>
Then in our web.config:
<globalization resourceProviderFactoryType="FactoryClassName, AssemblyName"/>
FactoryClassName then implements ResourceProviderFactory to provide the actual dynamic functionality. Localisations are stored in the DB with a string key "Path/To/Localisation"
It is important to cache the localised values - you don't want to have lots of DB lookups on each page, and we cache thousands of localised strings with no performance issues.
Use the user's current browser localisation to choose what language to serve up.
You might want to check GNU Gettext project out - at least something to start with.
Edited to add info about projects:
I've worked on several multilingual projects using Gettext technology in different technologies, including C++/MFC and J2EE/JSP, and it worked all fine. However, you need to write/find your own code to display the localized data of course.
If you are using .Net, I would recommend going with one or more resource files (.resx). There is plenty of documentation on this on MSDN.
As with most general programming questions, it depends on your needs.
For static text, I would use RESX files. For me, as .Net programmer, they are easy to use and the .Net Framework has good support for them.
For any dynamic text, I tend to store such information in the database, especially if the site maintainer is going to be a non-developer. In the past I've used two approaches, adding a language column and creating different entries for the different languages or creating a separate table to store the language specific text.
The table for the first approach might look something like this:
Article Id | Language Id | Language Specific Article Text | Created By | Created Date
This works for situations where you can create different entries for a given article and you don't need to keep any data associated with these different entries in sync (such as an Updated timestamp).
The other approach is to have two separate tables, one for non-language specific text (id, created date, created user, updated date, etc) and another table containing the language specific text. So the tables might look something like this:
First Table: Article Id | Created By | Created Date | Updated By | Updated Date
Second Table: Article Id | Language Id | Language Specific Article Text
For me, the question comes down to updating the non-language dependent data. If you are updating that data then I would lean towards the second approach, otherwise I would go with the first approach as I view that as simpler (can't forget the KISS principle).
If you're just worried about the article content being translated, and do not need a fully integrated option, I have used google translation in the past and it works great on a smaller scale.
Wonderful question.
I solved this problem for the website I made (link in my profile) with a homemade Python 3 script that translates the general template on the fly and inserts a specific content page from a language requested (or guessed by Apache from Accept-Language).
It was fun since I got to learn Python and write my own mini-library for creating content pages. One downside was that our hosting didn't have Python 3, but I made my script generate static HTML (the original one was examining User-agent) and then upload it to server. That works so far and making a new language version of the site is now a breeze :)
The biggest downside of this method is that it is time-consuming to write things from scratch. So if you want, drop me line and I'll help you use my script :)
As for the URL format, I use site.com/content/example.fr since this allows Apache to perform language negotiation in case somebody asks for /content/example and has a browser tell that it likes French language. When you do this Apache also adds .html or whatever as a bonus.
So when a request is for example and I have files
example.fr
example.en
example.vi
Apache will automatically proceed with example.vi for a person with Vietnamese-configured browser or example.en for a person with German-configured browser. Pretty useful.