T-Plan Robot Enterprise 2.3.5 Tool Panel

Contents
1. Tool Panel Overview
2. Settings Tab
3. Events Tab
4. Keys Tab
5. Variables Tab

1. Tool Panel Overview

Tool Panel is situated in the top left corner of the T-Plan Robot Enterprise window. It provides various controls which usually work accross the scripting editor, test script interpret and desktop viewer functionality. It consists of four tabs:

Settings tab configures I/O settings of the script in the active editor, especially the output and template paths and the report file.
Events tab displays a summary of recent events received from the desktop server. The content depends on the desktop protocol capabilities and some clients may not populate it at all.
Keys tab deals with key transfer to the desktop and allows to construct and send various key combinations including those which are otherwise captured by the local operating system.
Variables tab provides table of variables available for the script in the active editor.

The Tool Panel is by default always visible. To hide it select the Display Tool Panel check box in the Tools menu. This flag is valid for the time the application is running. To set the panel invisible on application startup open the Preferences window and select the Tool Panel tree node.

2. Settings Tab

This tab works closely with the script in the active editor. The controls it contains correspond to commands in the test script and any change will be also reflected in the script content. Its components include:

Output Path which is directory where screenshots, reports and other output files resulting from the script execution will be saved to. When you change the path, script variable _REPORT_DIR will be updated in the active editor. Default path is defined in the Language panel of the Preferences window. If this preference is not set, the path defaults to the user home directory.
Template Path, i.e. directory which will be searched for image comparison template images. When you change the path, script variable _TEMPLATE_DIR will be updated in the active editor. Default path is defined in the Language panel of the Preferences window. If this preference is not set, the path defaults to the user home directory.
Create report - select this option to insert a Report command into the active editor or deselect to delete it. There are two more options, Report File and Description. The report file field contains the report file name. Format of the report is detected by the file extension. While the default open source provider supports just HTML (.htm, .html), the Enterprise one also supports XML (.xml). Default value is 'index.html'.
Description, which will be displayed in the report header. See the sample reports created by the default (HTML) and enterprise (HTML, XML) report providers (external links).

An example displayed on the left will insert the following code into the active editor:

Var _REPORT_DIR="/tmp/report"

Var _TEMPLATE_DIR="/tmp/templates"

Report "index.html" desc="Example report"

Similarily when you update any of the commands listed above manually in the editor, the fields of the Settings tab will change as soon as the script gets compiled. Be aware that if the on-the-fly compilation is switched off, the fields remain out of sync with the script until you either compile the script manually or execute it.

3. Events Tab

Events tab displays the most recent list of events received from the desktop server. The event list gets reset by user actions, e.g. mouse click, press of Enter etc. The point is to provide just the list of events (updates) generated by the server in response on a user action. This allows to create an instance WaitFor command which waits for a particular event, for example for an update of the desktop image.

Be aware that content of the event list depends on the particular client capabilities and some clients may fail to populate it. The most used RFB (VNC) server delivers two types of events:

Update events, i.e. FramebufferUpdate events defined by the RFB protocol. These events represent update of a certain area of the remote desktop. If you select one or more events, the areas defined by them will display in the remote desktop as red frames. This feature may help you to inspect how the RFB server updates the desktop screen and tune instances of the Waitfor update command. Each event in the list displays the update rectangle in form of x:<x>,y:<y>,w:<width>,h:<height>, extent of the update as a percentage of the whole window and time from the last user action. Note that the list displays only update events which are greater than a certain extent. This limit is by default set to 10% and can be customized in the Preferences window.
Bell events which indicate that the remote server beeped (i.e. printed the Bell ASCII 0x07 character). You may take advantage of these events to determine that execution of a CLI command finished or succeeded/failed. See the Waitfor bell command for more information and examples.

As an example we executed a command "

ls -l
/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_13 && echo -e '\007'

" in a terminal window on Linux. It lists content of the given directory and emits a beep (prints out the ASCII 0x07 BELL character) if the listing is successful. The first event in the list represents update of the console window caused by the directory listing. When you select this event in the table, the updated area will display as a red frame in the remote desktop as is visible on the picture. The second event is the bell character printed by the echo command. Though WaitFor command may be generated for any of these two events, waiting for the bell is in this case more reliable because you are sure that the directory listing executed correctly.

Tool Panel - Events Tab

There's a small tool bar below the event table. It contains 3 buttons:

Button will insert a WaitFor command into the current editor. The command will be constructed based on selected event(s) and options defined in the recording preferences (panels Update Events and Bell Events in the Preferences window).
Button will open the WaitFor Command Window where you can construct a WaitFor command with custom options.
Button will open the Preferences window with recording options which are being applied to the previous two actions.

4. Keys Tab

Keys tab is aimed to help you to send such keys to the remote desktop which are reserved by your system. A typical example is Ctrl+Alt+Del, which is interpreted both by Windows and Linux systems as a system command. If you want to send this key to the remote desktop without conflicting with your system, you may use the tools provided by this panel. There are two options:

Tool Panel - Keys Tab

Quick Press allows you to select a predefined key in the drop down and send it to the remote desktop. The list is currently limited to the most frequently used key combinations. If you want to customize the list, modify the recording.quickKeys option in your configuration file.
Create Press allows you to create virtually any combination of keys. To press a key select the modifiers (Alt, Ctrl, Shift, Windows), choose a key in the drop down and press Apply. Note that the content of the key drop down is derived from Java internal classes. See the Key Browser help page for more info.

If recording is selected and you generate a key using this tool, a Press command will be inserted into the active editor. If the recording feature is off, you will be asked whether you want to insert the command besides sending it to the desktop or not.

5. Variables Tab

This tab contains a table of variables which are currently present in the compilation (the "Compilation Vars" tab) and execution ("Execution Vars") contexts.

There are generally two types of variables:

Predefined variables, sometimes also called implicit ones. Their name typically starts with underscore '_'. These are created by the underlying automation framework automatically for each script compilation or execution and/or generated by particular elements (commands) of the script.
Custom variables defined in the script through the Var and Eval commands. These variables are not available for Java test scripts unless they are populated through the setVariable() methods of the context object..

The picture on the left displays an example of the variable table after compilation of a simple script with a variable called MY_VARIABLE. A right click onto the variable opens up a context menu with the following actions (also available through buttons below the table):

The "View MY_VARIABLE value" displays a simple window with its value. This allows to view long and/or multiline values. Viewing of the variable value is also possible through a double click onto the variable.
The "Copy variable name to the clipboard" menu item (button) will copy the variable name enclosed in curly braces to the system clipboard from where it can be pasted to any other application.
The "Copy variable value to the clipboard" item (button) will copy the variable value to the system clipboard.
The "Copy variable name to the active editor" item (button) will copy the variable name enclosed in curly braces to the active editor. This is in fact a variable call and it will be replaced with the actual variable value when the script gets executed.
The "Copy variable value to the active editor" item (button) will copy the variable value to the active editor.

Variables may have a fixed value through the -v/--variable CLI option. Such variables have the '(fixed)' suffix appended to their name. For example, the image on the left displays a fixed variable called MY_FIXED_VARIABLE because the tool was started with the -v "MY_FIXED_VARIABLE=fixed" CLI option. Fixed variables can't be changed in the script and their value remains constant for the whole time of T-Plan Robot Enterprise execution. If you make an attempt to modify such variable using the Var or Eval command, it will be ignored and no error message or warning will be reported. This mechanism was designed to allow to design parametrized test scripts.