How can I automate clicking a button on a Flash menu?

Question

I would like to be able to click a button on a flash menu, programmatically.

This means, unfortunately, that tabbing over to it or hard-coding the X and Y coordinates of the button will not work (due to using multiple threads, neither of these approaches works while running in the background).

I tried doing this with Javascript, but automating it that way does not work because the individual items are inaccessible in Flash.

The reason I'm asking is because I'm attempting to load-test our application which interacts with a flash menu in order to build a report. From what I can tell, the low-end or open-source load-testing utilities don't offer much support in the way of flash navigation.

Does anyone have an approach that might accomplish this, or an alternative workaround?

Answer 1

If you're testing your own application then build in a testing API through ExternalInterface which you can call from JavaScript directly. Make the API and Button call the same method so you can effectively click the button simply by calling a method on the published external interface for your swf.