Hi Christian.
You should take a look at the SWTBot Generator. It records actions and generates a little script to replay the actions. But the script is really oriented towards testing and not for UI automation — it deals in absolute actions (e.g., set the content of the text widget to this string, switch to the part named ‘x’) rather than relative actions (insert this text, go the n-th last editor).
Although I’m sure I could have extended its Generator to record keystrokes, the real problem that makes keyboard macros difficult is that the application must behave in a very deterministic fashion. Otherwise the macro you just recorded may end up causing information loss. Here are some examples: - Open Type (Ctrl-Shift-T) highlights recently opened types at the top, so the user hitting arrow-down several times may not select the right file. Ctrl-E (the opened-files drop-down) is sorted in MRU.
- There is ambiguity in a number of actions. Does the user hitting Ctrl-F6 (show previous editor) want to go to the previously selected editor (relative), or to *that* particular editor (absolute)? (SWTBot’s Generator uses the latter interpretation.)
- The user keys ‘.’ in a Java editor, bringing up Content Assist, but the results are entirely contextual. During recording, the position may be a field, but on replay the position may be within a method. Or perhaps they’re using Code Recommenders, where the order of the elements is even less deterministic.
- The user clicks in a text editor. Was the user trying to set the cursor to that element? Or to that relative position? Was the intention for this particular editor, or because it was the most recently used editor?
I discovered early on that I needed to tie keystrokes back to the corresponding Eclipse command so as to be able to blacklist commands that are ambiguous in the users intention from an automation perspective. And I needed to provide facilities for disabling certain behaviours during macro recording and playback (e.g., to disable content-assist). And disable most mouse actions, since they introduce ambiguity. Brian. On 15-Jun-2015, at 1:51 PM, Lars Vogel <lars.vogel@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Christian,
SWTBot has already a UI recorder. See https://wiki.eclipse.org/SWTBot/Generator.
Adding Mickael to the email thread as SWTBot Lead he has more insights.
Best regards, Lars
On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 7:44 PM, Christian Pontesegger <christian.pontesegger@xxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Biran,
very interesting stuff. I always thought of getting a closer look into SWT Bot for UI event recording. In the end I would like to create a real recorder for EASE that allows to record all keyboard and mouse events and allows to replay them. Keyboard recording seems to be one step in that direction. Are you interested in working on such a full recorder?
Christian
On 15.06.2015 03:28, Brian de Alwis wrote:
I’ve submitted a first cut to provide keyboard macros (bug 8519) to the e4 incubator. It can be installed by using Help > Install New Software from
http://download.eclipse.org/e4/snapshots/org.eclipse.e4.ui/
under the Macros section. The implementation is specific to the Eclipse 4.x stream and has only been tested with 4.5 (Mars). There's some documentation at:
https://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/Macros
Brian.
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