Planning Custom Toolkit Support

Before you begin to create support for a custom toolkit, you must carefully plan the support. Detailed planning of how you want UFT One to recognize the custom controls enables you to correctly build the fundamental elements of the custom toolkit support. It is important to plan all of the details before you begin. Making certain changes at a later stage might require intricate manual changes, or even require you to recreate the custom support.

Note: This section assumes familiarity with the concepts presented in Implementing Custom Toolkit Support.

About Planning Custom Toolkit Support

Creating custom toolkit support is a process that requires detailed planning. To assist you with this, the following sections include sets of questions related to the implementation of support for your custom toolkit and its controls. When you are ready to create your custom toolkit support, you will be implementing support for it based on the answers you provide to these questions.

The first step is determining general information related to your custom toolkit, after which you define the specific information related to each custom class you want to support.

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Determining the Custom Toolkit Related Information

To plan the details related to the custom toolkit answer the following questions:

  • What is the name of the custom toolkit?

    Provide a unique name for the custom toolkit. After you develop the support and deploy it to UFT One, UFT One displays the custom toolkit name in all of the dialog boxes that display lists of add-ins or supported environments. For example, when UFT One opens, it displays the custom toolkit name as a child of the Java Add-in in the Add-in Manager dialog box and the UFT One user can specify whether to load support for that toolkit.

  • What custom classes are included in the custom toolkit?

    List the locations of the custom classes. The locations can be Eclipse projects, Java archive files or class folders.

    For the rules on grouping custom classes into toolkits you can support, see Preparing to Create Support for a Custom Toolkit.

  • What native toolkit (or existing supported toolkit) does the custom toolkit extend?

    Note: When all of the classes in a custom toolkit extend the basic user interface class of another toolkit (for example java.awt.Component) we say the custom toolkit extends that toolkit (in this example: AWT).

  • In what order do you want to create support for the different classes within the toolkit?

    For information on how to answer this question, see Determining the Inheritance Hierarchy for a Support Class.

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Determining the Support Information for Each Custom Class

Before you begin planning the support for a custom class, make sure you have full access to the control and understand its behavior. You must have an application in which you can view the control in action, and also have access to the custom class that implements it.

You do not need to modify any of the custom control's sources to support it in UFT One, but you do need to be familiar with them. For example, make sure you know which members (fields and methods) you can access externally and what events you can listen for.

When planning custom support for a specific class, carefully consider how you want UFT One to handle controls of this class. For example, what type of test object you want to represent the controls in UFT One GUI tests, and which identification properties and test object methods you want to use. The best way to do this is to run the application containing the custom control and to analyze the control from a UFT One perspective using the Object Spy, the Keyword View, and the Record option. This enables you to see how UFT One recognizes the control without custom support, and helps you to determine what you want to change.

To view an example of analyzing a custom control using UFT One, see Analyzing the Default UFT One Support and Extensibility Options for a Sample Custom Control.

When you plan your custom support for a specific class, you must ask yourself a series of questions. You can find a list of these questions in Understanding the Custom Class Support Planning Checklist. When you are familiar with the questions and you are designing your own custom support classes, you can use the abbreviated, printable Custom Class Support Planning Checklist.

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Where Do You Go from Here?

After you finish planning the custom toolkit support, you create the custom toolkit support set to support the custom toolkit as per your plan. You can create all of the required files, classes, and basic methods using the UFT One Java Add-in Extensibility wizards in Eclipse. The wizards also provide method stubs for additional methods that you may need to implement. For more information, see Using the UFT One Java Add-in Extensibility Eclipse Plug-In.

If you choose not to use the Java Add-in Extensibility wizard in Eclipse, you can still extend full support for the custom toolkit manually using the information in Implementing Custom Toolkit Support.

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