Automated Flex testing without static AutomationIDs

Question

Hey all-

Has anyone had any luck testing a Flex app without static Automation IDs attached to components? All of the elements in the apps are generated .....

We've investigated FlexMonkey but it appears to be incompatible with any app that utilizes the ExternalInterface. RIATest's scripting language leaves much to be desired...

Thanks- Jonathan

Answer 1

Unfortunately I don't know much about this kind of stuff, but I went to a talk that presented these tools for TDD: - Hudson - Flex Unit 4

I guess there are tutorials online, don't know if it helps with ExternalInterface testing.

Answer 2

Is there anything that prevents you from generating appropriate automationNames for your generated components? This way you should be able to refer to them properly in automation tools.

Are there any other non-changing properties that your generated components have, like maybe 'id'? If so you can use these properties to address the components. This is definitely possible in RIATest.

Answer 3

FunFX is a Flex automation tool that allows you to access components via ID, "automation name", "automation value" or index. While using something like the component index might be less than ideal for robust tests, if that's all that's stable, it might be worth a try. And it's written in Ruby, so that should satisfy any "real programming language" related requirements. :)

Answer 4

We added an "automationPrefix" property to many of our custom controls (particularly those that are reused many times on a single screen), and wrote code to append the beginning of the automationName property on any child controls. Setting the automationName was the most important parting of enabling automation testing on our Flex apps. There are several ways you could modify the automationName to be unique without making it completely static at the level that most test automation packages need it. We are currently using QTP as the test automation tool of choice.