Useful SenseTalk Functions

[Todd]

A question from the iEverywhere division of the bay area fruit company about plist management. In particular accessing property lists and their associated values. This quickly turned into the following FamousNames example handler, which returns a fairly long list of famous names as property lists with the keys (first, middle, last). Dealing with single name people (Prince, Cher, Bono, Pink, String), as well as names with multi middle names shows to be quit simple with the relative chunking.

Use your own web data source, flat file, database CLI calls, or data scraping tool as the rawdata() function allows you to source your data anywhere.

[Todd]

I got a call today, from none other than one of the top security testing firms in the world. And they are leveraging Eggplant to unobtrusively test devices and systems leveraging VNC enabled KVM switches. This gives a level of abstraction which with today's fast computers can cause the KVM interpretation of events to get out of sync with the remote SUT. Most of the higher quality KVM manufactures, Adder, Raritan have syncronization features forcing the mapping of events before continuing (much like an event queue 'flush' command). In most cases this works well. However in some limited cases its best to allow the KVM time to catch up as if a real world person were using the system under test.

To do so, our friends were using a handler aptly called MyClick, and of course a replacement for the venerable Eggplant Click command. MyClick was a simulation of the Click command, moving the cursor first on the SUT, then waiting a period of time (0.7 seconds in their case worked well), and then clicking where the mouse was located.

[Todd]

Recently one of our friends at a famous music software company mentioned to me they would like to have all global variables as a property list. Included here is a quick function call that will give you all globals.

[Todd]

Got some email a long while back, about temp file names in SenseTalk. I finally got the time to spend on the plane back from Italy to write some code and here is one of the many things I'll be posting in the next few weeks. A function to return a temp file name, giving you the power to specify the directory/folder, the seperator used between name components, and also finally the optional file extension.

[Todd]

There are times when cleaning up a line of text is necessary, and deleting all the whitespace (tabs, spaces, non printables) must be done. Here is a little routine to take a string of any line count, and iterate through each line stripping leading and trailing whitespace.

[Todd]

When folks turn to Redstone for solutions, we try hard to come up with them... One recent request was a need for random data sources to Black Box text an application, to test it by sending random data to it and see what happens (sometimes called monkey testing, where figuratively putting a monkey in front of the application and computer and have it bang away on the keyboard can produce some interesting application state/conditions to arise).

First was to develop some scripts to generate city, state and name values.

[Todd]

Often I find myself in need of quick reference to a Eggplant function, or SenseTalk handler. I also like to quit applications when I'm not using them, and Preview goes away immediately after I'm done with a search. Heading to the Eggplant->Help Menu all the time gets old. So, digging into the EggplantCommon.suite, I added the following 'OpenDocs' handler.

[Todd]

Detecting an operating system is simple, we do it by image or icon visualization. In the Mac world, we look for Mac elements that make it unique; rounded windows, window drop shadows, the dock, etc. In the world of Windows we look for things like shelf at the bottom of the desktop, maybe the default back ground image (in XP, the landscape shot), or even the blue screen of death (just kidding). However, we are looking for images or elements of visual nature, we identify unique things that tell us at some point there is a definitive possibility of a positive identification.

In the world of Eggplant, it is no different. We just pick image elements that are unique to the operating system, that will always be visible and then associate those with the operating system. For Mac, I choose the apple menu icon at the top left. For Windows XP the bottom start menu. I also for completeness choose the normal and clicked/moused over yet not in the image area. For mac, this is 2 images, and for windows you have three image states.

Then using the power of the image collections, these are each grouped into unique folders. Optionally you could just have single images as well, both collections and allowable image formats are allowed. Remember, collections are just folders with captured image elements as their contents.

[Todd]

If you generate exceptions a lot like me, learning the power of logging exceptions is important. Log files can then be used for script metrics, in turn to help during analysis and correcting faulty logic and SUT conditions. This all may help you grasp your current state of Eggplanting.

I use this LogException handler to log exceptions. You could change the LogWarning calls (I personally like the orange output) to more simple Log calls to avoid the warning count on your script results.

[Todd]

Just had a client reviewing Eggplant for command line only type testing. They didn't want to do any GUI verification. The notion of a site verification script came to mind to show how Eggplant's SenseTalk 'url' command was right for the picking.