[swtbot-dev] Cucumber running SWT tests

[Daniel Lucraft <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I have two questions about testing SWT that I hope you can help me with.

I'm not actually using SwtBot yet, though I'd like to. This is because we already have quite a lot of tests written using the current system and when I tried to drop in Swtbot just to handle some widget operations there were some conflicts. That's something I'd like to return to.

Currently we have:

 * a separate thread containing a Cucumber test runner
 * Cucumber is patched so that each step (every operation and assertion) is wrapped in a syncExec call

This is working pretty well so far. We have a lot of tests (like this:
http://github.com/redcar/redcar/raw/master/plugins/edit_view/features/undo_and_redo.feature

Each step (each given/when/then) is executed by Cucumber in a syncExec block, and the implementation of the step is manipulating widgets in the background and/or making assertions.

(Our step library is a bit adhoc, which is why I'm interested in using swtbot, but that's for another day)

So the first question is: does this jump out at you as being a bad idea in any way?

Second question:

We have one test I'm writing now (testing Macro functionality) that looks something like this:

  When I start recording a macro
  And I do X
  And I do Y (*)
  And I stop recording a macro
  And I run the macro (**)
  Then the output is correct

Because this is a macro, step (**) does X and Y again. In fact, the implementation of, say, X in steps (*) and (**) is making *exactly the same method calls* on the same widgets.

However the operation X works fine in (*) but doesn't work right in (**). So the tests fail. This is implemented correctly, manual tests in the editor work fine.

Remember that each *line* of that test is wrapped in a syncExec. So X and Y are in two separate syncExec blocks when they are listed separately, but they are in the same syncExec block when they are run in the macro in (**).

A couple more observations before I leave you with my question (thanks for reading this far!):

 * X is a method on StyledText. I notice that the method works by creating an Event and sending the event to itself. This clued me in that there is something 'eventy' going on <- this is my rough level of understanding :)
 * Step (**) usually fails. However, it will always succeed *if I constantly move the mouse over the window* while it runs !!!

I imagine that I need to somehow have the event queue flushed after every step, but nothing I tried works.

Do you have any idea what's going on?

thanks
Dan


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Daniel Lucraft

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