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matt_1's avatar
matt_1
Occasional Contributor
11 years ago

VM Error: There was an attempt to perform an action at a point, which is beyond the screen.

Hi All,

 

I recently ported all of our TestExecute projects over to VM clients. Since that time I've been periodically receiving the error "There was an attempt to perform an action at a point, which is beyond the screen." when my scripts try to click an item in a drop down.

 

All of the drop downs that my scripts call have been mapped, so I'm not accessing any coordinates within my scripts.  A simple example of a line of code that triggers the error is as follows:

 

"Aliases.frmAttendance.tblAttendanceReport.ddlAbsenteeReason.ClickItem aryReportData(7)"

 

The problem seems to be completely random in nature and I cannot reproduce it on my end at all but I'm continuing to see these errors in our log files each morning. The image of the error does not show the drop down is off the screen at all. In fact most of the time it's directly in the center of the screeen.

 

I wasn't seeing this issue prior to moving our projects to VM clients.

 

Has anyone else run into this issue on their end?

 

Thanks,
Matt

  • jmcpeek's avatar
    jmcpeek
    Contributor
    11 years ago

    Do you have any modals/dialogs in the actions prior to the error? Is the test running in Internet Explorer? I've seen that in IE sometimes there are memory issues where TC thinks a modal is still open even if it's clearly not.

    • matt_1's avatar
      matt_1
      Occasional Contributor
      11 years ago

      We do have modals that we handle within some of our tests but none of our tests prior in our projects deal with modals anywhere before the error occurs.

       

      And yes, we are running all of our projects within Internet Explorer.

       

      I have had some success getting around the error by wrapping the drop down click in an If statement with a WaitAliasChild and then a 1 second delay prior to clicking the dropdown, which makes me think TestExecute is trying to click the item in the dropdown too quickly and is setting it's own coordinates for the item it has to click incorrectly. This is a terrible solution for us though because we have a couple thousand tests with tens of thousands of lines of code and I can't seem to pinpoint the problem to one area.

      • jmcpeek's avatar
        jmcpeek
        Contributor
        11 years ago

        For me, it came down to IE. When we run the test in Firefox, the problem doesn't occur. So for the project where the issue pops up, we have to run the test in FF instead of IE. We know it's not an issue with the site because it doesn't happen when interacting with it naturally, so it's an acceptable workaround for us.

  • mtsmith's avatar
    mtsmith
    Contributor
    11 years ago

    Similar random issues were experienced when attempting to set values in combo boxes using Windows 7 guests on a VWare host. The issues could not intentionally be reproduced and eventually disappeared after upgrading the VMWare server hardware. Two major differences is that we're testing Java SWT desktop applications and TestComplete aliases are not used. There's lots of moving pieces in software testing including monthly patch cycles, software upgrades, network changes and hardware upgrades, so it's not for certain that old slow hardware was the problem, but it appears to be. Currently, the virtual machines are configured as Windows 7, SP1, Dual 2.80 Intel Xeon processors.