Mandatory and assistive properties
Relevant for: GUI tests and components
If you find that the description UFT One uses for a certain object class is not the most logical one for the objects in your application, or if you expect that the values of the properties currently used in the object description may change, you can modify the mandatory and assistive properties that UFT One learns when it learns an object of a given class.
However, during a run session, UFT One looks for objects that match all properties in the test object description—it does not distinguish between properties that were learned as mandatory properties and those that were learned as assistive properties.
For example, the default mandatory properties for a Web Image object are the alt, html tag, and image type properties. There are no default assistive properties defined. Suppose your Web site contains several space holders for different collections of rotating advertisements. You want to create a test or component that clicks on the images in each one of these space holders.
However, because each advertisement image has a different alt value, one alt value would be added when you create the test or component, and most likely another alt value will be captured when you run the test or component, causing the run to fail. In this case, you could remove the alt property from the Web Image mandatory properties list. Instead, because each advertisement image displayed in a certain space holder in your site has the same value for the image name property, you could add the name property to the mandatory properties to enable UFT One to uniquely identify the object.
Also, suppose that whenever a Web image is displayed more than once on a page (for example, a logo displayed on the top and bottom of a page), the Web designer adds a special ID property to the Image tag. The mandatory properties are sufficient to create a unique description for images that are displayed only once on the page, but you also want UFT One to learn the ID property for images that are displayed more than once on a page. To do this, you add the ID property as an assistive property, so that UFT One learns the ID property only when it is necessary for creating a unique test object description.