Command Overview

As you've seen in the previous example, the language supports a set of commands. There are three basic groups:

1. Desktop commands represent user actions on the remote desktop.
   
• Connectand Disconnect connect to and disconnect from a desktop. The test script may be connected to one desktop at a time. There's however no limitation on how many desktops you connect to and disconnect from within one single script and you may do a bit of automation on one system and then switch to another one.
  
• Mouse command performs a mouse move, press, release, click or drag.
  
• Press, Typeand Typeline commands deal with keyboard input. The Pressone allows to press virtually any key or a combination of key with one or more modifiers ( Shift, Ctrl, Alt, Windows). The Typeand Typeline extend the Press command to type a continuous text optionally followed by Enter ( Typeline).
2. Administration & Execution Control commands provide necessary infrastructure for test script execution control as well as support of variables, libraries and external OS command calls.
• Varand Evalcommands allow to define variables. While Var simply assigns a string value to a variable, Eval expects the value to contain a numeric expression, evaluates it and assigns the result to the variable. Variables play an important role in script parametrization and will be discussed in a separate topic.
• Run and Include link other test scripts. While Run executes the test script specified by the argument (including Java ones), Include just makes all global variables and procedures in the argument script available to the calling script. This allows you to create libraries of common constants (variables) and tasks (procedures) and link them as a library to multiple scripts. In version 2.2 and higher Include also allows to load JAR files and made compiled Java test scripts available for execution with Run.
  
• Pause, Exit, Wait and Break provide unconditional ways to control script execution. Pause pauses the script indefinitely until a human resumes it manually from GUI or CLICommand Line Interface. This is often used in together with the Sendmail command (discussed further on) to pause a runaway script and and notify the administrator that assistance is needed. Exit terminates the script, procedure or a block of code and returns the numeric specified in the argument (zero usually means success while other values indicate a failure). Wait suspends script execution for a specified fixed amount of time. Finally, Break is exclusively used to terminate the innermost forloop.
• Waitfor and Compareto allow to wait for a specific event and act upon the result. Waitfor pauses execution of a script and waits for a desktop event (such as screen update, bell or change of the desktop clipboard content). It can also employ image comparison to test the desktop image and pause the script until a certain image appears or as long as an image is visible on the screen. Compareto is solely used for one time image comparison.
• Exec executes a command of the local operating system (meaning the system on which T-Plan Robot runs, not the remote desktop one unless both the client and server run on the same system). As result of the command as well as the console output it produces are made available to the script as variables, it may be optionally used to load small amounts of data and/or perform output on the OS level (for example appending of text to a file).
• Stringperforms text operations such as search for a substring, matching with another string or a regular expression, string cutting, parsing and many more ( Enterprise version 2.2 and higher).
3. Reporting commands generate various automation outputs.
• Screenshot takes a screen shot of the desktop (or its part) and saves it to a file. As the command is conveniently integrated with the Compareto one, it may also take a screen shot and perform image comparison in one go.
• Warning creates a warning log to be consumed by the report producer.
• Script and Step allow to structure the test script to test cases (called "scripts" in T-Plan terminology) and individual test steps. The structure is then reflected in the test result XML and report. Referencing of an existing script in T-Plan test management database also enables to export the test results to T-Plan Professional ( Enterprise version only).
• Report produces an HTMLHypertext Markup Language. A set of tags used to mark the structural elements of text files. HTML files include tags that create hyperlinks to other documents on the Internet. or XML ( Enterprise version only) report with test scripts results. The report shows all outputs produced by the commands described above, such as screen shots, warnings and step/script elements. Have a look at the report example.
• Sendmail sends an inline E-mail from the script through an SMTP server. The body may be plain text or HTML and the message may contain file attachments.
  
4. Input/Output (I/O)commands allow to load data from or to store data to various resources ( Enterprise version 2.1 and higher).
• File reads from and writes to plain text files and files in the Comma Separated Values (CSV) format.
• Excel reads from and writes to MS Excel spread sheets (.xls).