Re: dogtail-devel [PATCH] Have focus() return bool indicating success

[Zack Cerza <zcerza redhat com>]

Cole Robinson wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> This patch provides functionality I talked about in the previous thread.
> Focus returns a boolean value indicating whether or not it managed to
> focus on the specified component.

Hi Cole,

I have a better understanding of what you're looking for, now. Right now 
we've got two different types of feedback for focus() failures: if 
config.fatalErrors is true, we throw exceptions. If it's False, we just 
print warnings. I see now that you're really just asking for a way to 
programmatically tell if the call fails without having to deal with 
exceptions. Seems pretty sane.

> I think this is a useful thing to have but upon reevaluation its
> probably not the cleanest way to determine if a gui component has been
> created yet, since trying to focus on a non-existing widget causes (by
> default) a lengthy backoff-retry loop. I wasn't hitting this in my
> original crack at this patch as I was only testing with applications and
> frames which don't have the backoff.

Since the backoff-and-retry code is needed to find objects that are 
created in response to something you've done in a script, I don't think 
there will ever be a way to make the case of the object simply never 
showing up take less time to figure out, apart from tweaking 
config.searchBackoffDuration and config.searchCutoffCount like you've 
already done. Now, if you know you're about to execute some call that 
shouldn't need any of that, you can always change the config values 
right before the call, and change them back right after.

> Regardless, this is still useful for test purposes. I have also attached
> a small script to test this capability and show a basic usecase. Also in
> this patch is a small change to the failure message when we do not
> manage to focus on a component, making it more verbose.

The warning format looks better, too. But what if there was no roleName 
specified?


Thanks,
Zack