T-Plan Robot Enterprise 4.3.1 Doc Collection GUI Reference

25/09/17

T-Plan Robot Enterprise 4.3.1 Integration Reference

1. Overview

This document provides a top-level summary information on how to integrate T-Plan Robot Enterprise with 3rd party solutions.

2. Product Integration Guides

This chapter lists existing integration guides for particular software products.

Product Name	Description
T-Plan Professional	T-Plan Professional (TPP) is a test management tool produced by T-Plan. It supports export of test cases to Robot test scripts, automation execution and result reporting. For details refer to the online integration guide.
Continuous Integration (Hudson, Jenkins)	Our online T-Plan Robot Enterprise And Continuous Integration guide provides a instructions on how to integrate with Jenkins. The steps may be reused for Hudson.
Java IDE (Netbeans, Eclipse)	There are no IDE specific plugins for direct integration with T-Plan Robot Enterprise. Robot's project structure is however compatible with the one used by most IDEs and the project folder may serve as home of both the Robot and Netbeans/Eclipse projects. This enables development of Java test scripts and any supporting Java code in both environments in parallel. Detailed instructions on how to set up a Netbeans development environment are maintained in our Developing Java Test Scripts document. The steps may be reused for Eclipse or another IDE.

3. Generic Integration

• The Robot's Command Line Interface(CLI) is designed to support easy generic integration:
• To execute a script or schedule use the -r/--run option.
• The System Under Test (SUT) can be specified at the start up through the -c/--connect and -p/--password options. The scripts may otherwise connect on their own using the Connect command.
  
• Custom values can be passed to the script through the -v/--variable options.
  
• On production of headless environments (terminal/rsh/telnet connections) use the -n/--nodisplay option to suppress the GUI.
• The overall result of the automation is indicated back through the process exit code (0 is PASS, anything else is FAIL). For more details parse the XML report created by the script through a call of the Report command. It's path may be set from the CLI through the -v option (-v "_REPORT_DIR=<targetDir>").
  
• The TPR language provides a few commands suitable for simple integration:
• The Exec command can execute a local OS command, for example to pass some data to another process through the CLI.
• The File and Excel commands allow to read and write data from and to plain text, CSV or MS Excel files. This can be used for simple communication with another process.
• The SendMail command sends an email from the script.
• The environment (system) variables are seen in the script as the _ENV_ prefixed variables. For example, the Path variable on MS Windows is available as the _ENV_Path variable.
• The Robot's Java API is ideal for those who wish to integrate with a Java app or framework or to call custom functionality from test scripts:
  
• Java test scripts can be started from any 3rd party Java app. To call the TPR code from Java create a wrapping Java test script and call the TPR file(s) using the run(java.lang.String) method.
• Java test scripts can call any 3rd party functionality and are ideal to implement connectivity from test scripts to your framework. The classes may declare the parameters to create a user friendly GUI editor. The compiled Java code may be then packaged to a JAR file called test script plugin and plugged back to the TPR language through the Include and Run commands. This system allows you to mix Java and TPR code as you wish. For reference code examples see the free open source Extent Reports and SQL Database plugins on our Plugins web site.
• Several Robot features can be customized at the Java API level through parameters and system properties.
  
• The Utilities plugin delivers the FileControl script which allows to feed TPR or Java code to a running Robot instance on the fly. Your framework may provide the data and task flow and drive Robot to do the automation.
  
• The Remote Control client allows to communicate with a running Robot instance over TCP/IP. It supports to perform basic script tasks such as start or stop test scripts, get the current execution status or kill the server. This functionality allows to build a distributed system which controls Robot instances on remote machines.