Re: dogtail recorder?

[Zack Cerza <zcerza redhat com>]

Hi Bill,

Bill wrote:
> I'm working with a group which is trying to come up with a way to automate regression testing of a Linux screen reader (makes it possible for vision-impaired people to use the computer). We are looking at dogtail, I read the helpful articles on Redhat Magazine;
> http://www.redhat.com/magazine/020jun06/features/dogtail/
>
> We don't want to test the applications themselves, we need to use GUI applications to test the screen reader. The more apps the better. You have to write a script for each app, and if you want to go through them pretty thoroughly the scripts can be lengthy, a lot of work to write.
>   
Yes, we agree; that's why we wrote the recorder. While sometimes you'll 
want to take the script you've recorded and tweak it a bit before you 
put it in a test suite, the recorder will still save you lots of time.

> In the RH Magazine articles they said they would "walk through using Dogtail's headless mode and the record and playback tool". But I don't see that anywhere and no documentation on it online elsewhere either. Record and playback sure would be handy for us. Is it working?
>   
It's true that there isn't really any documentation covering the use of 
the recorder. It's intended to be a fairly straightforward thing: Start 
it up, press Record, do some things, press Stop. Chances are you'll want 
to edit the script a little either before or after saving it. And yes, 
it does work quite well.

Now, if someone were to hypothetically write some documentation for 
it... we'd be totally fine with that. ;)

> When I try to run dogtail-recorder I get a warning that "recorder.glade" couldn't be found and then a lot of error messages. Am I missing something?
>   
To see the warning is normal; it looks in two places for recorder.glade, 
and if it didn't find it in the second place you'd see that message 
again, and you'd also see the app crash because that file is what 
defines its UI. As for the other error messages, I'm curious as to what 
they are. Could you paste a few of them into a reply to this mail?

> Thanks for any help!
>   

No problem at all.

Zack