About OpenText Functional Testing Web Add-in Extensibility

The OpenText Functional Testing Web Add-in provides built-in support for a number of commonly used Web controls. You use OpenText Functional Testing Web Add-in Extensibility to extend that support and enable OpenText Functional Testing to recognize additional Web controls. You can also use Web Add-in Extensibility to teach OpenText Functional Testing to recognize a group of controls or Web elements as one object. For example, if a search button and an edit box comprise a search box, and you want OpenText Functional Testing to see them as one functional unit.

When OpenText Functional Testing learns an object in an application, it recognizes the object as belonging to a specific test object class. This determines the identification properties and test object operations of the test object that represents the application's object in OpenText Functional Testing.

When OpenText Functional Testing learns the controls on a Web page without Extensibility, it ignores certain types of elements and does not create test objects to represent the controls they define.

For other Web controls that are not supported out-of-the-box by the Web Add-in, OpenText Functional Testing creates a generic WebElement test object. This type of test object might not have certain characteristics that are specific to the Web control you are testing. Therefore, when you try to create test steps with this test object, the available identification properties and test object operations might not be sufficient.

For example, consider a custom Web control that is a special type of table that OpenText Functional Testing recognizes as a plain WebElement. WebElement test objects do not support GetCellData operations. To create a test step that retrieves the data from a cell in the table, you would need to create test objects to represent each cell in the table, and create a complex test that accesses the relevant cell's test object to retrieve the data.

Alternatively, consider a table on your Web page that is made up of multiple appended html table elements. You can define rules that help OpenText Functional Testing recognize this aggregate table as one object, and provide relevant test object methods. For example, methods that receive a row number relative to the aggregate table and know which html table actually contains that row.

By creating support for a Web control using Web Add-in Extensibility, you can direct OpenText Functional Testing to recognize the control or group of controls as belonging to a specific test object class, and you can specify the behavior of the test object. You can also extend the list of available test object classes that OpenText Functional Testing is able to recognize. This enables you to create tests that fully support the specific behavior of your custom Web controls.