Testing GUIs with TextTest and StoryText
Plugging in support for Custom Widgets
StoryText naturally only provides support for widgets supported by the generic frameworks. If your application makes use of custom widgets you will need to write Python code to tell it what to do with them.
The basic idea is to provide a file called customwidgetevents.py and set the PYTHONPATH environment variable to include the directory where it is. (For Java GUIs you need to set JYTHONPATH instead). You then provide a member called "customEventTypes", which is a list of pairs of widget types and lists of event classes that can be applied on them. You then define these event classes in a similar way to the way they are defined for the standard widgets, and the best approach in the absence of complete API documentation is to look for something similar in the source and try to do likewise.
Here's a (very stupid) example for PyGTK:
from usecase.gtktoolkit.simulator.baseevents import SignalEvent
import gtk

class MyButtonEvent(SignalEvent):
   def generate(self, *args):
       print "We faked a button click!"
       SignalEvent.generate(self, *args)

   def shouldRecord(self, *args):
       print "Refusing to record the button click!"
       return False

class InsertEvent(SignalEvent):
   signalName = "row-inserted"
   def connectRecord(self, method):
       self._connectRecord(self.widget.get_model(), method)

# Standard name for module containing custom widget events
customEventTypes = [(gtk.Button, [ MyButtonEvent ]),
                   (gtk.TreeView, [ InsertEvent])]
This code will mess about with how Buttons are handled: it will print a message every time the replayer generates a click on it, and it will refuse to ever record such a click.
Meanwhile an additional event monitoring has been set up for rows being inserted in tree views, which StoryText will ordinarily ignore as it's done by the program itself rather than the user.
If all you need to do is listen to and generate a signal, just inherit from SignalEvent and set the signalName. (In this case as the signal was on the gtk.Model rather than the widget itself we also had to adjust how to monitor it)
Basically, adding support for custom widgets is much like extending StoryText itself, beyond the basic hook mechanism above to connect it.


Last updated: 05 October 2012