What is the best approach for scripting with name mapping or without name mapping?

In my experience...neither. I try to find everything dynamically by it's name, text, or caption. In some applications I use text recognition. The reason I find everything dynamically is probably a common issue for many people where if any parent object in the hierarchy changes then every child object will need it's name remapped or fixed. If you have large scripts this can be an EPIC undertaking. I suggest looking at .Find, and .FindAll methods as well as text recognition.

Unless you use extended find in your name map.



But that comes with it's own pitfalls. Namely, performance hit (it slows things down) and also that by using it you can *possibly* be masking a breakage you may actually be interested in finding. I guess it's also possible that it could actually find the wrong thing, but that hasn't happened to me yet.



I use a combination of both. Name maps (with Aliases - full name map reference are pretty horrible) for the parts less prone to changing at run-time and on-the-fly identification for the more dynamic parts.



Either way, if your application is still subject to change, you're likely to hit problems of some sort at some point along the line. Unless you do all your searching from the base level of the object tree .... which I would imagine would also cause performance issues?

Hmm, I'm not as familiar with pure java based applicatioins for TC; our application is driven by the browser.  Can SWTObject's not be defined with more specific "named" properties?  One thing I've found in my software development work is that developers are usually amenable to helping automation testers by giving good name mapping properties to page objects, if you catch it and ask them during initial development at least.

For dynamic sites/apps NameMapping is evil! You will have to do lots of maintenance :)



In other hand, for static products is a great feature, it depends on your product.



I always search for objects as described by Ryan.

You might also want to consider how to handle the name mapping file if you have concurrent test development on your project and or source control. With multiple users you'll have to manage and merge different versions of the name mapping file.

I use the same approach as Ryan and have a script that locates the object using the find method and it works just fine. Way more robust as we only need a property name and value pair to locate any object on the page and not have to care about the path to the object.

I usually specify a process and form to search within. 99% of the time this does not lead to duplicate items being found, but when it does it's filtered by several routines that I use to iterate the array returned by FindAll. Basically I manually check several properties to find the "best" or "most likely" match to what im looking for. Each property having a priority such as Name will match before Caption and Caption will match before Text. The item most closely matching my search I then return to the calling function.

In regards to performance if you specify a process and form you'll cut down your search process significantly. My function is something like this:

//not my actual code :)

function Search(Process,Form,Text){

//find the form

var myForm = Sys.Process(Process).Find('Name','*' + Form + '*',1,true);

//get all visible objects on form

var myObjArray = VBArray(myForm.FindAll('Visible',true,500,true)).toArray();

//iterate object array and return the best match

return BestMatchFromPropertyValues(myObjArray);

}

Hi All,



Thanks everyones for your comments and its realy helps me.



............

Thanks

Dev

Hi All,

Find, Findall, and FindChild all accept Arrays for property names and values.