Planning Support for Your Toolkit

Before you begin to create support for a custom toolkit, you must carefully plan the support. Detailed planning of how you want OpenText Functional Testing to recognize the custom controls enables you to correctly build the fundamental elements of the custom toolkit support.

Note: This section assumes familiarity with the concepts presented in Introduction.

About Planning OpenText Functional Testing Support for Your Toolkit

Extending the OpenText Functional Testing Web Add-in's support to recognize custom controls 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 create your toolkit support set, you implement 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 control you want to support.

Preparing to Create Support for a Custom Toolkit

Before you begin planning support for custom Web controls, make sure you have full access to the controls and understand their behavior. You must have an application or Web page in which you can view the controls in action, and view the source that implements them.

You do not need to modify any of a custom control's sources to support it in OpenText Functional Testing, but you do need to be familiar with them. For example, make sure you know what elements and attributes the control comprises, what HTML properties it has, and what events you can listen for.

Determining the Toolkit Related Information

When you plan your toolkit support set, begin by deciding the general toolkit related information:

Provide a unique name for the toolkit or environment for which you are creating support.

OpenText Functional Testing displays the name of your environment in all of the dialog boxes that display lists of add-ins or supported environments. For example, when OpenText Functional Testing opens, it displays the name of your environment as a child of the Web Add-in in the Add-in Manager dialog box and the OpenText Functional Testing user can specify whether to load support for that environment.

Decide which controls this toolkit support set will support.
Decide what files will contain the JavaScript functions that you write for the toolkit support set.
- You can specify one default file for the JavaScript functions that implement support for the different OpenText Functional Testing functionalities and the different test object classes. In addition, you can define separate files for your implementation functions for the different functionalities and test object classes.
- You can specify one file that contains common JavaScript functions that you call from within others.
Decide whether to use one JavaScript function for the whole toolkit to match test object classes to the custom controls. For more information, Configuring which test object class to use for a custom web control.

When you design the toolkit support set, you specify this information in the toolkit configuration file. For more information, see Understanding the Toolkit Configuration File.

Determining the Support Information for Each Custom Control Type

When planning custom support for a specific type of control, carefully consider how you want OpenText Functional Testing to handle controls of this type. For example, what type of test object you want to represent the controls in OpenText Functional Testing GUI tests, and which identification properties and test object methods you want to use. Make these decisions based on the business processes that might be tested using this type of control and operations that users are expected to perform on these controls.

You can run an application containing the custom control and analyze the control from an OpenText Functional Testing perspective using the Object Spy, the Keyword View, and the Record option. This enables you to see how OpenText Functional Testing recognizes the control without custom support, and helps you to determine what you want to change.

Note: Web Add-in Extensibility can be used to create support for Web controls within Web pages and frames. You cannot develop custom support for Web pages or frames themselves.

To view an example of analyzing a custom control using OpenText Functional Testing, see Analyzing the default support and extensibility options for a sample control.

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

Where Do You Go from Here?