T-Plan Robot Enterprise 2.3.5 Desktop Viewer
Contents:
1. Desktop Viewer Overview
2. Connecting And Disconnecting
3. Refresh Daemon
1. Desktop Viewer Overview
Desktop Viewer is a GUI
component which displays image of the currently connected remote desktop. The word "remote" here merely indicates that
it must be other desktop than the one that currently displays the
viewer itself (further on called "local
desktop"). In this mode the viewer acts as a consumer
of input mouse and keyboard events. It becomes active whenever you move
your mouse pointer into the component bounds and it takes advantage of
the underlying desktop client to send all mouse moves, clicks and drags
as well as the keys you press or type on the keyboard to the desktop.
Note that the viewer can handle just one desktop connection at a time
and there is no support of tabbed connections at the moment.
If the Component Capture mode is
on, the viewer freezes the desktop image for component capturing
purposes. See the Component Capture help
topic for details.
When a local desktop is
connected (for example through the Java client), the viewer
intentionally doesn't display the desktop image because it would lead
to an infinite mirroring effect.
The
viewer in such a case behaves as if there was no connection at all
("off line mode") and the viewer displays
the default content with links to documentation and development
resources as is shown on the following picture.
Figure 1-1: T-Plan Robot Enterprise with
disconnected and connected desktop viewer
The viewer is also able to operate in the read-only mode when no user input is
transferred to the remote desktop. To switch this mode on or off use
the Read Only menu item or tool bar
button. It is useful when more users share the same desktop or when you
want just to view it without interacting with it.
The read only mode may be also toggled through the Ctrl+F10 shortcut key (configurable
in the Desktop Viewer panel
of the Preferences window). This works
even if the desktop is active and the key is filtered out from the
communication between Robot and the desktop server. This is handy when
one needs to take a screenshot of or create a template image from a
desktop which displays an application driven by mouse moves, such as
for example the Windows Start menu. The short cut key in this case
toggles on the read only mode and stops the viewer immediately from
sending the mouse events to the server.
The viewer also
automatically switches to read-only mode when a script execution
is
started to prevent users from unintentional interference with the test
environment. This behavior is configurable in the Desktop Viewer panel of the Preferences window and it works as follows:
- When a script gets executed and the read-only mode is
already on, the feature does nothing and it doesn't reset the mode when
the script finishes. The point is to preserve the mode before the
execution and respect the user manual setting.
- When the read-only mode is off when a script gets started, the
mode is set on when execution starts and it is set off when the script
finishes.
The viewer plays an important role in the main GUI. It allows to
interact visually with the remote system under test in order to record
and design test scripts or to watch progress of an automated testing
process. Script Recorder and Script Editor are other two major GUI
components which cooperate closely with the viewer to produce automated
testing scripts. The Script Recorder
is able to attach to the viewer's input event queue and record user
interaction into the active script editor. The Script Editor then allows to execute
the script or its part on the connected desktop.
2. Connecting And Disconnecting
The viewer may connect to a desktop
in three ways:
- Automatic connection using CLI connect options such as
-c/--connect
,
-p/--password
and -u/--user
. See the CLI
Options Specification.
- Manual connection through the Login Window.
- Programmatic connection through execution of a Connect
command or its corresponding Java
Test
Script API method from an automated testing script.
To disconnect from a desktop
select Disconnect Desktop
in
the File menu. You can also disconnect by execution of a Disconnect command.
Connecting to another desktop while there's already an active
connection will also disconnect the original desktop.
3. Refresh Daemon
Refresh daemon is a background process which keeps your desktop session
alive. If you don't move your mouse or type a key for a long time, the
remote server usually runs a screen saver or locks up the desktop after
a
certain time. Some desktop servers are also known to close the
connection
after a period of idle time.
Refresh daemon prevents these situations. It watches the time since
your last interaction and when it exceeds a certain value, it moves
your
mouse by one or two pixels and back. This makes your desktop server
think
that you are still active and keeps the connection alive.
This feature is by default on and the timeout is set to 5 minutes.
To configure it go to Preferences and
select the Tools -> Desktop Viewer tree node. Note that the Refresh
Daemon doesn't run while a script is being
executed. This is intended to prevent unwanted interference into the
script execution. There's a flag in the preferences allowing to
change this behavior and run the daemon even during automation.