Brad Tilton

3 minute read

The Automated Test Framework received some incremental updates in the Paris release aimed at increasing test coverage and making testing a little easier for custom UIs.

Add Attachments to Form (SP) Test Step

The first of our Paris ATF enhancements is fairly straightforward, but really helpful if you need to write an automated test for attaching a file to a record through the form widget in the Service Portal. This would work on a record producer, catalog item, or record form using the form widget.

addattachments.png

Page Inspector Enhancements

The page inspector received a couple of helpful enhancements detailed below.

Page Inspector - Launcher

Prior to the Paris release there were only two options for launching the page inspector: Service Portal and UI Pages (Shown on the left in the image below). In Paris, there are now more options for launching the page inspector (on the right).

pageinspector.png

Standard UI and Custom are the new page types supported by the launcher. You can find out more about these two options on the Inspect different page types docs page, but I would also encourage you to take the page inspector for a spin and try it yourself. Does it let you test what you want it to?

Page Inspector - Untestable Page Components

Even though you can now open a record form through the page inspector there are still many UI components that you cannot test with custom UI test steps because there are already test steps for things like setting values in fields, etc. As you can see in the gif below, the page inspector will now give an obvious visual indicator of what is and is not testable on the page, complete with messaging if you try to inspect an untestable component.

Custom UI Tests

Custom UI Tests and the Page Inspector are closely related, so it’s reasonable to expect updates to Custom UI Tests after the page inspector received some enhancements in Paris.

Custom UI Tests - Indexing

The first thing that has been improved is indexing. When Custom UI Tests were first launched there was limited support for being able to interact with duplicate components on the same page. This is problematic in situations where the Type, Label, and Page area attribute are all the same for different components. You can see from the screenshot below that an order attribute has been added when you mouse over one of these components that will show you the order in which it appears on the page.

ordering

More information and examples can be found here.

Custom UI Tests - Versioning

Versioning for Custom UI Test Steps is one of those things that you may not encounter and you hopefully will not need to worry about, but it’s nice to know it’s there. This feature is really something that came out of the page inspector enhancements. The team wanted a way to enhance custom UI support behavior without breaking existing tests. From Paris forward, custom UI test steps will now use versioning. Existing tests will continue to run as they had before and new tests can take advantage of enhanced functionality and new features.

For example, if you had a test that was testing a UI Page and upgraded to Paris it would continue to work the same way, even though the custom UI test step has been updated in Paris to look at component ordering. If you update the test, or copy it and create a new one, it will automatically use the latest version of the custom UI test step.

ATF Resources

You can find additional resources on ATF at the following links:


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