Re: dogtail recorder is looking better

[David Malcolm <dmalcolm redhat com>]

On Wed, 2006-09-27 at 17:20 -0400, Edward Rousseau wrote:
> Zack Cerza wrote:
> <snip>
> > 
> >> 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 maybe we should implement a configurable keypress delay in dogtail. 
> Other GUI record playback tools use this to get around problems like 
> this. This would be an amount of time in ms automatically inserted 
> between keypress events. It would probably live in Config.
> 
> Thoughts?
Thinking aloud, you could measure the actual delay between events, and
embed sleeps of the corresponding duration.  Some recorders do this.
The resulting script would probably look ugly though, and I'd expect
plenty of cases to fail.

Dave