Test Execution Monitor Window
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NOTICE: the features described below will only be available in the PRO version with releases 1.8 and greater.
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Introduction
It is often desirable, to monitor or control the test execution via a specialized, customizable control user interface. For example, you may want to show:
- a progress bar,
- an animation of the currently executed test
- additional test- and result data display
Or, in some situations, your testSuite may have to interact with the operator,
ask for confirmations, configuration, feedback or other parameters.
The expecco pro version offers additional powerful mechanisms to help the test developer in implementing better user interaction. The two key features for this are:
- Elementary native GUI Form Dialogs
- Compound GUI Interfaces (programmable interactive GUI applications)
For test execution, two mechanisms have been added to display those interactive GUIs:
- Customizable Control and Monitor Window
- Customizable Control and Monitor Web Interface
Elementary GUI Form Dialogs
These are "Elementary Blocks" with a GUI. When activated, a GUI block opens its GUI as a dialog window, displays all of its input values in the corresponding components, and waits for the user to interact, and finally close the dialog.
Then, values as entered by the user are written to the output pins, and the execution control flow proceeds as usual. From an execution point of view, these blocks behave similar to other elementary blocks.
A concrete example for such a user constructed forms dialog is found in the examples section of this wiki. See the "UserInteraction" example .
Compound GUI Interfaces
These are "Compound Blocks" with a GUI. As before, a wide range of components is avalable to construct almost arbitrarily complex GUIs from simple building blocks.
However, these blocks are compound blocks; when activated, they also start to execute their activity diagram blocks (in addition to showing the GUI). Arbitrary actions, loops and decisions can be programmed into these activities, and the GUI remains visible as long as that block remains active (i.e. it could be started as the main execution block, to keep the interface active for the whole test execution time, if desired).
A concrete example is found in the examples section of this wiki. See the "MeasurementValueGUI" example .
Building GUIs in the GUI-Painter Tool
The components of a GUI can be Buttons, Toggles, RadioButtons, InputFields, Sliders and many others. User User interfaces are constructed in the built-in GUI-painter using drag & drop. Components (also called "widgets") are pulled from a component gallery into a canvas view:
Additional plugin-libraries are available upon request, to add additional (also customer-specific) graphic elements to the widget gallery.
Please notice, that this GUI-painter is a very sophisticated tool in itself, not available in many, even expensive, development environments.
GUI Portability
These GUIs run without change on all Windows, Linux, Solaris and HPUX-based machines. With one of the next expecco-pro versions, they can even be visualized in a web-browser without a single change. This is perfect if you have to monitor the progress of your tests which run on a remote host on the test-floor.
Compound GUI display options
In a supervised test, the tester has complete control over how and where these compound GUIs are to be shown. Inside the "Execution" options of the testSuite, he will find an option selector to choose from:
- None - no GUI. The test will fail if any block attempts to open a GUI
- Ignored - suppress the GUI. The test proceeds, but will not display a GUI
- Dialog - Show the GUI in modal Dialog-Window
- Window - Show the GUI in the "Control and Monitor Window"
- FullScreen - Show the GUI in full screen above all other windows
- Web - Show the GUI in a Web-Browser using the "Control and Monitor Web Interface"
None - no GUI allowed
In this mode, no GUI is shown. Any attempts to execute a GUI block will immediately result in the test being terminated with an error.
Ignored - GUI suppressed
No GUI will be shown. The corresponding compound GUI block will execute as usual, but no window will pop up and no values will be shown. If there are any "event-Wait" steps inside the compound blocks activity diagram, these will raise an error.
Show in Dialog Window
A regular native window is opened, showing the GUI. The window will disappear automatically, as soon as the compound step has finished.
Show Full Screen
A regular native window is opened, showing the GUI in full screen mode above all other windows. The window will disappear automatically, as soon as the compound step has finished.
Show in Control and Monitor Window
The GUI is shown within the Control and Monitor Window. This window is opened only once, and remains open. If multiple GUI-blocks execute in sequence, one GUI after the other will be displayed within that single window. Thus, any activity of any testcase can visualize itself and the overall progress is easily tracked by the test operator.
Show in Control and Monitor Web Interface
This is similar to the above, but the interface can be seen in a web-browser, anywhere within the intranet. This is a fantastic way, to track executions on a remote testhost, in the testfloor, or inside a virtual machine. If the access and security policy has been set up accordingly, this even allows for test-execution-monitoring of remote sites.
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