Active Screen Pane

Relevant for: GUI tests and scripted GUI components

The Active Screen pane enables you to view snapshots of your application as it appeared during a step in a recording session.

Right-click in the Active Screen to add steps, checkpoints, or output values after running your test, without opening your application.

Access the Active Screen pane

Do one of the following:
- Ensure that a GUI test, action, or component is in focus in the document pane.
- In the solution explorer, select a GUI test or component node, or one of its child nodes.
Select View > Active Screen.

Save your test with Active Screen content

To edit a saved test directly from the content shown in the Active Screen, instead of opening your application again, first save your test together with the Active Screen content.

With your test open, select File > Save As and select the Save Active Screen files checkbox.

If you no longer need the Active Screen content to further edit your test, and want to save disk space, save your test again with the Save Active Screen files checkbox cleared. From this point, the Active Screen files captured during recording are no long available with your test.

Update a single Active Screen capture

Update the Active Screen files saved with your test if your application has changed, and you want to use Active Screen files to edit your test based on the updated application.

To update an Active Screen capture:

Ensure that the updated window or page in your application is open and available, and that the Active Screen pane is displayed in UFT One.
In the Keyword View, click a step that you want to change. The window or page is displayed in the Active Screen pane.
Select Tools > Change Active Screen. The UFT One window is hidden and the mouse pointer becomes a pointing hand.
Click the window or page displayed in your application.
When a message prompts you to change your current Active Screen display, click Yes.

Active screen support per technology

If you are testing an application using a specific UFT One add-in, check the known issues for that add-in to see which Active Screen options are available for that add-in.

For example:

MDI applications and the Active Screen

When you are recording on an MDI (Multiple Document Interface) application, the Active Screen does not capture information for non-active child frames.

Web testing and the Active Screen

When testing Web-based applications, the following applies:

The Active Screen displays the captured HTML content using an Internet Explorer browser control, even if you ran your steps on another browser.
Depending on your settings, the Active Screen may capture your HTML page before or after various scripts ran on the page.
Some pages may look slightly different in the Active Screen than they appeared during your record or update run session, and some property values may be different or may not be available.
UFT One stores the URL path to images and other resources on the page, rather than downloading and storing the images with your test. Therefore, you may need to provide login information to view password-protected resources in the Active Screen.

ActiveX controls / Java Applets and the Active Screen

UFT One loads ActiveX controls or Java Applets to the Active Screen in view-only mode. This means that you cannot perform operations or retrieve additional information on the loaded ActiveX or Java objects from the Active Screen. To do this, first load the relevant add-in, and the record directly on the object again.

Additionally, ActiveX controls or Java applets that are loaded to the Active Screen may not work exactly as they do in the application. In some cases, this may cause unexpected behavior, depending on the implementation of the specific controls or applets that are loaded.

For more details, see Known issues.

The Active Screen and Insight

For steps that contain Insight test objects, the Active Screen provides only a visual reference to the application and the test object's context. The Active Screen displays the Insight test object highlighted within a screen capture of its parent object.

This means that you cannot use the Active Screen of an Insight step to view object properties, to insert checkpoints or output values, or to add objects to the object repository.

Additionally, the OCR text recognition mechanism is not supported for objects in the Active Screen.