How to end Tests in Robotframework - swing

I am testing a swing application, with the standalone version of Robot Framework and I am now at the point that my tests go through to the end.
However, Robot Framework will hang after the output of the report etc., leaving the prompt open.
Now i have two questions:
Is there a way that Robotframework closes this too?
And how does RF close Applications?

In our software we are using the system.exit(0)-code to terminate. This also terminate the Robotframework.
After I created a parameter in the beginning, that checked if the Software is starting with RF, it exclude the system.exit and RF ends the test with no Problems.

Related

cucumber-jvm: how to use the same window instance across all the tests

I am using cucumber-jvm with groovy and fest to test a Swing application.
Every time a scenario is run the main window app is created (and destroyed at the end).
How can I avoid it? How can I run the same instance of the window across all the features?
Fest needs to be in the same Java process as the main window app, so the cucumber-jvm stuff that calls Fest methods in the steps definitions is in the same process. After the cucumber scenario finishes it calls System.exit() that stops that java process that cucumber is in (and the process were the main app window is).
Just reimplement that part yourself so it does not call the System.exit() and it will not destroy it at the end.
(This is the class that you need to reimplement https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-jvm/blob/master/core/src/main/java/cucumber/api/cli/Main.java)
Look # Cucumber jvm seems to use System.exit

WSO2 JUnit/Integration Testing

I'm in the process of building a Carbon Archive using the new WSO2 Developer Studio. I'm trying to work out how I can wrap the components (Sequences/Proxies etc) in JUnit tests. These tests will need to run as part of a CI build process (Jenkins) in order to detect errors with any modified code. I've done some research and can't seem to find anything that immediately stands out on how to achieve this. I did find this link https://wso2.org/jira/browse/TOOLS-855
which suggests that it hasn't yet been implemented. Can anyone confirm when this will be implemented or if there is any way at present to achieve this?
There is currently no straight forward way to implement this scenario and this feature will be supported in a future version.
One mechanism i can think is that, add a separate Test module as a part of the build which executes after building C-Apps.
So what happens in here is that, first Jenkins produce the CAR file for C-Apps. Then Maven start executing the JUnit test suite. Before the execution of Test Suite, you can configure maven to copy the CAR files to Servers and start up server. Then execute the Test Cases against the started up server.
This way you can deploy the new CAR files in your Carbon Server and execute the tests against the new configuration in the Server.
Thanks and Regards,
Harshana

CI-friendly automated builds for as3/flex projects

Disclaimer: I am relatively unfamiliar with the flash build processes, so some/all of this may be misinformed nonsense. Please feel free to suggest alternative approaches.
We're currently developing a flex web app and our build situation is far from ideal. At present we're (as in individual developers) just building using FlashBuilder and deploying manually. The programmers are currently screaming bloody murder for two reasons, though:
The lack of CI is like going back to the stone age
We don't much care for FlashBuilder
(Note: We're only using FlashBuilder because it was the easiest way to set up a flex project in conjunction with Away3d and get it building / rendering correctly -- it's a stopgap solution).
As a predominately .NET development shop, we're used to doing continuous integration as well as continuous deployment. Ideally, we'd like to get something comparable to this for our flash projects without tying ourselves to a particular IDE.
Requirements:
The build process must be:
.. runnable via the commandline
.. runnable on both developer and CI build machines (and certainly not requiring an IDE!)
.. preferably as IDE-independent as possible (pragmatism will kick in though; if this causes a lot of friction we'll just pick one).
.. able to run on Windows (we develop using Windows)
We don't mind a touch of duplication or a few manual steps (e.g. tarting up the build scripts if we add a new project via an IDE, or generating one configuration from another if tools exist), but the less duplication / maintenance required the better.
I've read quite a few articles / blog posts and watched some short screencasts, but most of them are very thin on the ground on how the build system sits alongside IDEs. Most articles/screencasts have the same formula: How to create a "Hello World" build using a single file & text editors (no IDE).
I've not seen the topic of multiple libraries/projects etc. being broached, either.
After reading around the issue for a while, I'm considering investigating the following options:
Project Sprouts
Flexmojos
Maven Flex Plugin
buildr as3
Does anyone have any experience of the above solutions (or others I'm unaware of) and, if so, what do you make of them? Any help / pointers appreciated.
I recently started building with Gradle and the GradleFx plugin and I immediately fell in love with its power and ease of use.
Gradle is ANT + Maven + Ivy evolved and is primarily used from the command-line. You can:
write scripts in Groovy (a powerful Ruby-like language that runs in the Java Virtual Machine)
access all existing Maven and Ivy repositories as well as your own repos
use existing ANT tasks
integrate with CI (in Jenkins you just tick a checkbox to activate Gradle support)
although it has originally grown from the Java/Groovy community, it is in fact language agnostic. You add language-specific plugins for added functionality. GradleFx is such a plugin that provides you with additional ActionScript/Flex building tasks.
do easy multi-project builds. e.g. you can compile, unit test, package and deploy both your .NET service layer and your Flex client application with just one command.
use convention over configuration: if you stick to the conventions, your build scripts will be extremely terse
generate all kinds of reports: unit testing, checkstyles, codenarc, ...
generate Eclipse, IDEA or other IDE projects
all the things I haven't discovered yet
And best of all: it's very easy to learn. I had no knowledge of Maven before I started with Gradle and could get a multi-project build with some customizations working quite quickly.
Edit (comparison to Buildr AS3 and Maven)
I can compare this only to one of the projects you mentioned: Buildr AS3. It seems to start from a philosophy that is similar to Gradle's. But I've tried to use it about half a year ago and couldn't even get a simple 'Hello World' app to work. I e-mailed the developer for help: no response.
Compared to GradleFx: I had a small forum discussion with the developer (on a rather philosophical topic, since I didn't really need any help because it just worked right away). He answered within minutes.
As for Maven: (for what it's worth) I've only glanced at some configurations and they seem overly complicated when I compare them to a Gradle script.
There is one thing Maven does that you can't do with GradleFx (yet). It can pull the right Flex SDK from a Maven repo and build against that. With GradleFx you have to have your SDK's available locally.
I'm quite familiar with using maven as the main build tool and the flexmojos plugin from Sonatype. My experience has been a bit of a roller coaster with flexmojos. Maven is completely solid, it works all the time without issue, the only issue is the flexmojos plugin which has fluctuated a lot between versions. If you choose to go this route make sure to grab the source for flexmojos so you can see what your configuration options are actually doing to the command line parameters etc. For Flex 3.x flexmojos 3.x up to around 3.9 is good and works fine with regard to the goal for generating the .project eclipse files, believe there's also a mojo (a maven plugin) for generating intelliJ IDEA project files as well as others. If you're using Flex 4 you can compile with the latest flexmojos 4.0RC2 but it appears to me that the goal for generating flex/flashbuilder project properties is now gone (I'm not sure if this is because it's been replaced by another plugin altogether or what the deal is). However building with maven and flexmojos does fulfill all of your goals above (we also use it for building our service layer, so in a single mvn clean install we get a jar packed in a war packed in an ear with everything configured and a swf, that part is really nice). Also you can do continuous integration using bamboo (or simply write your own script that is triggered from a cron job or in windows as a batch file executed with a scheduled task if you don't have a *nix server around). Let me know if you'd like any more details or if I missed something major.
Shaun
I have been using Hudson, now Jenkins, with Ant for Flex automated builds and FlexUnit testing. Jenkins has some really useful plugins for integration with eclipse (and hence, FDT or FlashBuilder), Jira, SVN, Git etc., and it's free. Also, you can integrate the Ant build into Maven scripts, so I've found this to be a good and flexible solution for all purposes I've come across so far.
The Flex SDK comes with Ant tasks, and writing even elaborate Ant build scripts is quite easy - in fact, I'd been using Ant locally before, and I could reuse my existing scripts with only a few added extra compiler options for FlexUnit tasks.
However, it took a while to set up the system correctly for unit testing, because I'm running a headless server on Linux, and that implicates a rather complicated environment for ActionScript tests, because they run only in Flash Player. This, of course, is true for all CI scenarios using FlexUnit, regardless of which server you use.
Here's what I've learned:
FlexUnit needs a standalone debugger version of Flash Player installed, but Adobe only distributes binaries for the standard version on Linux. Therefore, compiling from source was necessary, and since my server system is stripped down to the bare necessities, it took some effort to install all the correct dependencies and get them to work.
The Flash Player needs hardware to run correctly: It uses graphics, therefore it needs a graphics card, and sounds, therefore it needs a sound card. On my headless server, this meant I had to install a VNC host to get it to run at all, and I had to eliminate any tests using sounds (those will now only run on local machines). If anyone ever comes across a working sound card emulation for openSuSE that I could use with the VNC client - you'll be my hero forever!
If you've set asynchronous timeouts in your unit tests, and/or you need to use setTimeout() to send delayed procedure calls, make sure the intervals aren't too short - I've had problems with tests that ran fine on any local machine, but broke the build on the CI server, because the Flash Player is considerably slower on the VNC client than on an actual graphics card.
I've also found this last issue to be a healthy lesson: Criteria for unit tests should not be based on assumptions about the system's performance, or at least be tolerant enough to succeed even on a slow machine.

Easiest way to unit test SWT and Swing apps in a headless environment?

I'm looking to unit test some SWT and Swing code for a project I'm working on and the tests run fine as long as I'm running them from eclipse.
As soon as I run them in my hudson environment it fails since hudson runs the tests in headless mode.
What's the best way of doing this? Open source solutions only please (since the project is open source).
You could run Xvfb (X virtual framebuffer, an X11 server that performs all graphical operations in memory) and this works fine.
But there is another solution with Hudson's plugin for Xvnc. Simply install the plugin and check the checkbox in the job configuration screen:
alt text http://www.justinedelson.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/xvnc_box.jpg
Hudson will then automatically start up a Xvnc session and set the DISPLAY environment variable to the appropriate value and then shut down the session when the build is complete. One advantage this has over the Xvfb method is that if you have multiple Swing/SWT projects building simultaneously, each build has its own X session. This may not be an issue at all but it seems like a good idea.
Before using this plugin, you obviously have to have Xvnc installed. What's less obvious (although sensible) is that you must also set a password. You do this by running:
$ vncpassword
This has to be done as the same user Hudson runs as.
Try the Abbot Java GUI Testing Framework and SWTbot. At least SWTbot should be able to do it.
If neither offers a headless mode, then this blog post might give you some ideas how to get rid of the UI for testing.
Using Swing I tend to organise things so that the component tree can be created without a Window at the top. Doing this allows you to simply create a JPanel in a unit test and use that as your top-level component. There are certain things you cannot test, such as focus and any logic involved in the creation of the Frame for normal operation, but the vast majority can be tested.
You may want to look into the FEST library to make life easier whether you go headless or not, it looks very good: http://fest.easytesting.org/swing/wiki/pmwiki.php
I was sure I posted this here before, not sure what happened to it.
Cacio allows for running Swing app headless.
http://rkennke.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/cacio-for-ui-testing/
I don't know about SWT, but with Swing you can't. Any instantiation of a Window (JFrame, JDialog, etc.) even if it is never set to visible will blow up in headless mode (on JDK 5). What we did was not run in headless mode and install Xvfb to provide the windowing without actually having a real windowing system installed.
You could try RedDeer Testing framework
https://github.com/jboss-reddeer/reddeer
• Support for running tests in a Jenkins CI environment (Hudson like)

Can I parameterize a CruiseControl.NET project configuration such that the parameters are exposed by the web interface?

I am currently trying to use NAnt and CruiseControl.NET to manage various aspects of my software development. Currently, NAnt handles just about everything, including replacing environment specific settings (e.g., database connection strings) based on an input target that I specify on the command line.
CruiseControl.NET is used to build the application for the default environment (dev) anytime new code is committed. I also want CruiseControl.NET to invoke a build for my additional environments test and stage, but I do not want these to be automatically invoked every time that a dev build invoked (daily) as test and stage deployments happen far less frequently. Test and stage deployments only occur when the application is ready for QA.
I can easily do this by specifying multiple projects, one for each environment. However, I already have many projects configured, one for each milestone in within my application. If I have to setup 3 projects for each milestone the CruiseControl.NET configuration can get out of hand quickly.
Here is my question:
Can I parameterize a CruiseControl.NET project configuration such that the parameters are exposed by the web interface?
Preferably (I think), I could have checkboxes for each environment (e.g., dev, test, stage) exposed in the web interface. A build would be made for each environment that is checked, whether the build was forced or automatic. It would be even better if I could default the checked state.
This feature (Dynamic Build Parameters) is currently being worked on for 1.5, and you can try it out in the nightlies. Here's a post describing the feature.
As Scott has mentioned, this isn't available, but it wouldn't take too much just to write a little template and then auto-generate the ccnet.config file given that template and a list of environments in a mail-merge type way.
Unfortunately, you can't do anything like that with CruiseControl.NET. It's a good idea, so you might want to submit it as a feature request.
This is fully supported now starting with cruisecontrol 1.5: http://cruisecontrolnet.org/projects/ccnet/wiki/Parameters