GUI engines

Version 3.4.4

GUI engines

SWT and Swing can be combined together in a single application, both by creating different kinds of toplevel windows for SWT and Swing, but also by embedding components of one kind into the other. QF-Test supports testing such kinds of applications.

To that end, the new concept of a GUI engine was introduced. One GUI engine is responsible for handling recording and replay for one GUI toolkit thread. Normal applications have only one such thread. As explained above, combinations of Swing and SWT are possible that have one thread each and will thus require two GUI engines to operate in parallel. In theory it is also possible to have multiple GUI engines of the same kind, e.g. by creating multiple instances of the SWT Display class.

Each QF-Test GUI engine is identified by a token for the GUI toolkit and a number. awt0 is the primary GUI engine for AWT/Swing and swt0 the primary engine for SWT. Unless you have a very special application you will never need to concern yourself with the number of the engine, as there will never be an engine called awt1 or swt1 and the alias awt or swt is sufficient. When recording, QF-Test always uses the latter. If your application is either AWT/Swing only or SWT only, engine names can be left empty.

In a test-suite, engine identifiers are now stored in the following places:

'Wait for client to connect' nodes. Only required if your application combines AWT/Swing and SWT. By specifying the engine attribute you can wait for the respective GUI engine to become initialized.
'Window' nodes. The engine of a 'Window' node marks the window and all its child nodes as being either AWT/Swing or SWT. Embedded components of the other kind will be moved to a node for a pseudo window.
'SUT script' nodes. An 'SUT script' is executed on the event dispatch thread of the SUT, so for combined AWT/Swing and SWT applications the engine is required to specify whether the script should be run on the AWT/Swing thread or the SWT thread. Thus, an 'SUT script' node can only retrieve and interact with components of one kind.
'File selection' nodes. For Swing applications, the 'File selection' node is rarely used because the Swing JFileChooser is implemented in Java and can be fully controlled by QF-Test. The SWT FileDialog on the other hand is similar to the AWT FileChooser. Both are implemented natively and QF-Test has no control over the individual controls. Thus file selection must be replayed using the 'File selection' node. Because this node is not explicitely associated with a 'Component' or 'Window' node, the engine has to be specified within the node.