Introduction StoryText Docs Toolkit specific The StoryText idea Screencast (Eclipse RCP) FAQ StoryText Concepts Application Events GUI shortcuts Other tools JUseCase for Swing (inactive) nUseCase for .net Download and install Basic command-line usage Usage with TextTest Command line options Custom Widgets Application Events GUI shortcuts Signals on UNIX Developing StoryText PyGTK Tkinter wxPython SWT/Eclipse RCP/GEF Swing Supported widgets PyGTK Tkinter wxPython SWT/Eclipse RCP Swing

(See here for an explanation of what an Application Event is: the basic idea is to support synchronisation by recording and reading of "waits")>

The implementation in StoryText, for the three Python toolkits supported, consists of calling the method "usecase.applicationEvent" from your code at the relevant places. For Java GUIs, only a name can currently be provided, please refer to the formats for SWT and Swing for their mechanisms.

The signature of the method is as follows:

def applicationEvent(self, name, category=None, supercedeCategories=[], timeDelay=0.001)

but for normal purposes you can just set a name and ignore the other parameters. This name will then be placed after "wait for " in the usecase files when the event is recorded, so choose something that makes sense in that context, e.g. "data to be loaded".

The next most usual thing to need is a category, which is also a string. Application events in the same category overwrite each other so that only the last application event in a given category is recorded before any other command. Those without a category are considered to belong to a global category and hence overwrite all other application events. For example, the following code:

usecase.applicationEvent("hell to freeze over")
usecase.applicationEvent("the cows to come home")

will result in

wait for the cows to come home

to be recorded, and hence for the first event to be ignored when replaying. On the other hand, if we assign categories like this:

usecase.applicationEvent("hell to freeze over", category="religion")
usecase.applicationEvent("the cows to come home", category="zoology")

the recorded script will instead say

wait for hell to freeze over, the cows to come home

and both calls will need to be made before replay will proceed.

The "supercedeCategories" parameter is essentially an even finer-grained control over the same overriding mechanism and provides a list of categories of application event that will cause this event to be superceded (NOTE: not a list of categories that this event will supercede). This should only be needed in rare circumstances.

The "timeDelay" parameter only affects replay and essentially introduces a sleep in the replayer: i.e. it indicates that replay should proceed a certain time after the current event. It is obviously a fairly crude tool and should be used sparingly, but this is basically how you insert a "sleep" using StoryText if there is nothing else you can do.