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Software
testers
often automate some mundane
tasks which increases their
efficiency and add value
to the project. This automation can
be done using any
automation tools or writing
your own scripts.
When a
task is such that you need
to access system information
on windows,
then one of the best candidate for
automation is VBScript. It
allows you to access the
registry information and
other system information
easily. Using VBScript does
not even require any
application or framework for
execution. The WSH
(Windows Scripting Host)
takes care of execution,
which is installed by
default on almost
all Windows OS.
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Though VBScript is very
useful in many situations,
it does not provide
enough
functionality to take inputs
from the user. At the most,
there
are input boxes. Using
these input boxes is not a
good idea because of the
possibilities of typographical errors in
user-supplied data. What if
we have functionality like
check boxes or radio buttons
so that user just selects
what he wants but their
input is restricted by the
options we provide them.
Yes,
We can have such Functionality
from within VBScript also.
This could be implemented by
the help of HTML
Applications which is also
known as HTA.
Now
Question is why
do we
need user input when we want
a process to be automated.
Automation means no user
intervention…that’s right.
Well I can think of a
scenario, which I faced
while automating ‘Install
Testing’. We had an
application, which
integrates with various .NET IDEs like VS.NET
2003 and VS.NET 2005. During
install testing, one of the
main task is to check
registry values. There were some
registry values, which
were common for both the IDE’s while
others were
specific to
a
particular IDE. In order to
check these completely, we
should have information on
the IDE used for test so
that specific registry
entries can be tested. This
could be achieved by
following two mechanisms -
- Have
two separate scripts one
for each type
-
Just check for the existence
of any one of the IDE’s
and perform
accordingly.
These
approaches had few drawbacks.
In
the first one I had one
common code for both the
scripts, which was
redundant. Besides that, there
might be a possibility that
user might have both the IDE’s in that case both the
scripts needed to be
executed causing the common
component checking twice
which was unnecessary. In
the second approach the
existence of any one of the
IDE’s could be tested only
based upon the registry
entries but how will you
check
the if the registry
key itself is not present.
In this case it would cause
an error and script will not
be executed.
The
better approach is to give
choose IDE for which testing
needs to be performed. User
can specify
appropriate IDE and code
will be executed according
to the user input. This
could be achieved by having
check boxes as shown in
figure below. Test execution
will take place based on the
choices made on this form.
How to
Implement it?
Now
comes
the question of
implementation. Well very
simple yes it indeed is.
Use HTA !!!!. HTA allow us
to combine Internet Explorer
and scripting code and, in
turn, give our scripts a
graphical user interface.
There could be different
mechanism to incorporate a
graphical user interface
into your scripts, but this is
probably the easiest.
I think, best way to
understand this is by
looking at the code itself,
so let’s
start by giving you the code
for HTA. Prior to that
Create a file with a .htm
extension and in between the
<HTML> </HTML> tags you just
write your VBScript code
<Script LANGUAGE="vbscript">;
Sub Button1_OnClick
blnselect = False
strVS8
= ""
strVS7
= ""
If
Document.InstallForm.option1.Checked
Then
blnselect = True
strVS7 ==
Document.installForm.option1.Value
End If
If
Document.InstallForm.option2.Checked
Then
blnselect = True
strVS8 =
Document.installForm.option2.Value
End If
If Not
blnSelect
Thenn
Alert "You must select VS
type"
Exit Sub
End If
' Create
the File System Object
Set objFSO =
CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
'You can use this file to
store user input
Set
objFile =
objFSO.CreateTextFile("C:\InstallInfo.txt")
objFile.Close
'Call
your automation scripts
based on the choices made
here.
call
AutoInstall(strVS7,strVS8)
End Sub
</Script>
This code should be
self explanatory. Best part
of this code is its
simplicity and the way it
allows GUI enabled
user input in your
software test automation.
You could
learn more about HTA from
this link from
Microsoft.
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