[LDTP-Dev] LDTP Newsletter - Issue IV - 30 September 2005

jpremkumar jpremkumar at novell.com
Thu Sep 29 22:23:57 PDT 2005


LDTP Newsletter


Issue IV - 30 September 2005

Welcome to the fourth issue of LDTP Newsletter!. Its my pleasure to
inform you about this release of LDTP which comes in with loads of
features. This newsletter also includes latest news on our approach
towards achieving an automated test engine. Useful references have been
included at the end of this article for those who wish to hack/use LDTP.

LDTP is now at version 0.2.0. 

Prerequisites and Installation Summary:

Following are the requirements for setting up LDTP
        +  Python 2.3 or higher
        +  Python Imaging Library
        +  libstatgrab and pystatgrab [please use the development
snapshot for libstatgrab which includes an important fix for a crasher
bug]
             You can download these libraries from here
        +  Import utility of ImageMagick

    You can download the latest version of LDTP from here. LDTP is
available in rpm as well as deb package format. For a step by step
instruction on setting up LDTP please refer
http://gnomebangalore.org/ldtp/index.php/How_to_setup_PY-LDTP_in_NLD

Whats New in this release:

* New Searching Algorithm ('Prem'):
      The searching algorithm used by pyldtp to capture the
accessibility handle of the required GUI object has been changed to the
new algorithm. This new algorithm uses the child index of every object
with respect to its parent to identify a path to the child from the
window handle. Here, by path I mean the list of GUI handles which forms
the ancestors of the required object. Thus this new algorithm increases
performance by many folds by reducing the time taken for getting the
accessibility handle of a gui object. Things like instance index and
relevant index are no longer used in the searching algorithm.
      Verification of the obtained handle is done using the
label/label-by field.

* New Appmap generation ('Prem'):
      For the above explained algorithm to work, the appmap generated
should contain the parent name and the child index with respect to its
parent for every object. Hence the appmap module has been changed to
provide the required values in the generated application map.

* pyldtpeditor ('Shaheed'):
      Herecomes the most interesting part. This release includes a new
editor custom built for LDTP. Using this editor we can do the following 
+ Write automation scripts
+ Create the xml file for gldap with the list of scripts along with
their data files
+ Create data xml file for the scripts in an easy way.
      For more detailed help on using this new editor please follow this
link 

* Performance monitoring API ('Subodh'):
      This release includes a new performance monitoring API using which
we can log performance related statistics of a particular process
simultaneously while executing the automation scripts. For this we make
use of libstatgrab and pystatgrab. This library provides a common set of
APIs across different flavours of Linux, solaris and BSD. So it became
an ideal choice for LDTP. For more information on these libraries please
refer this link

* gldap ('Nags'):
      This release includes a new utility called gldap which accounts
for group based execution of individual automation scripts. Apart from
group based execution, this utility will help one to gain control of the
flow of execution of scripts and relieves the script writer from some
logging and initialisation work that is common to all scripts.

* DataFileParser ('Nags'):
      Hereafter all the scripts would be using xml based data files. To
achieve this we will be using this new utility called 'DataFileParser'
which comes as part of the ldtputils module in pyldtp. This utility will
relieve the script writer from the pain of parsing the data file by
himself and also provides a consistant data format across all scripts.

* New component functions:
+ Bug #316045 - Three new component functions for handling text
properties ('Prem')
+ Bug #316046 - API to select a date in the calender object ('Prem')
+ Bug #316047 - 'gettextvalue' to get the current value of the combo box
('Prem')
+ Bug #316681 - 'doesrowexist' to check if a Table/TreeTable contains a
given string in any of its rows ('Prem')
+ 'selecttabindex' - New API for selecting a page tab based on tab
index. ('Nags')
         + 'remap' and 'undoremap' - To deal with gui objects created at
runtime ('Prem')

Major Bug Fixes:
        + Following bugs have been fixed in this release - #315009,
#315267, #316270, #316351 ('Prem')

Important News and Facts About LDTP:
        + LDTP CVS has been moved to freedesktop.org. Please follow this
link to browse the CVS repository. Please use our mailing list in
freedesktop.org henceforth.
        + Varadhan has been using LDTP for hacking memory leaks in
Evolution. For more information please refer this link.
        + Saravana is working on integrating LDTP with TOMATO. Please
follow this link for more information on this.

Known Issues:
        + Remap component function fails when used with windows whose
label has changed.
        + Due to changes in pyldtp and appmap modules, most of the
automation scripts available in pyautosuite will break. Hopefully those
scripts will be ported to the current version of pyldtp and appmap ASAP.
        + Existing scripts should be changed to make use of gldap and
DataFileParser.

References:

All the published newsletters including the current one can be
downloaded from http://gnomebangalore.org/ldtp/index.php/Newsletters.

For release notes of every release including the current one please
refer http://gnomebangalore.org/ldtp/index.php/Release_Notes

For information on various API s in LDTP including those added for this
release can be got from
http://gnomebangalore.org/ldtp/index.php/API_Reference

For detailed information on LDTP framework and latest updates visit
http://gnomebangalore.org/ldtp/

For the latest news on LDTP please visit
http://gnomebangalore.org/ldtp/index.php/News

To subscribe to LDTP mailing lists, visit
http://gnomebangalore.org/ldtp/index.php/Mailing_List

IRC Channel - #ldtp on irc.gimp.org


For suggestions to improve this newsletter, please write to
jpremkumar at novell.com

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