Re: dogtail recorder is looking better

[Zack Cerza <zcerza redhat com>]

Bill wrote:
> The code we checked out from CVS this afternoon is working better.
> Still some keyboard navigation problems though, and even mouse-click
> navigation fails in some cases.
> Using the alt-F key in gedit doesn't result in error messages now but
> it still doesn't work. Also we are not able to select files to open from a script.
>
> Do me a favor please. Run gedit and record a typical session where you
> open a file, edit it, save it, and close it, all with the mouse.
> Then play it back. If you have a number of files can you select and open any but
> the first one?
>   
Ugh. It seems that table doesn't implement the AccessibleComponent 
interface, which is what provides us with screen coordinates (x,y,w,h) 
so that we can actually detect which widget was clicked. That is a bug 
in gedit.

Dogtail does provide an API to select and deselect nodes in a table, but 
it appears this table also doesn't implement the AccessibleSelection 
interface. That is also a gedit bug.

In summary, we can't do what the app doesn't let us. So we're very 
slowly getting app maintainers to fix accessibility problems to address 
that.

> Then try the same session with keyboard input only.
>   

This works pretty well, with one caveat: after pressing <alt>f (which 
works here provided you make sure gedit actually has keyboard focus when 
that gets executed), Down and Enter, the open files dialog pops up. But 
since it takes a few seconds, it misses the next keystroke: I pressed 
Down 4 times, then Enter, to get into my Desktop folder; it missed one 
of the Down presses and went into ~/bin.

That one can't be fixed in a reliable way without the script author 
providing more information to dogtail, e.g. "wait until this table has X 
amount of items before continuing" - and I've never been able to come up 
with a sensible way to let that happen. In practice what usually happens 
is that a sleep() will be put into the script at whichever point the 
slowdown occurs. From what I understand about similar tools on other 
platforms, you generally have to tweak your recorded scripts a bit 
before they work as expected.

Zack