Re: GUI Testing (was: Some shortcomings in gtestutils)

[John Ralls <jralls ceridwen us>]

On Feb 20, 2013, at 6:46 PM, Federico Mena Quintero <federico gnome org> wrote:

> * Now that the a11y infrastructure is included in-the-box with GTK+, it
> sounds like a good idea to start putting an a11y-based testing
> infrastructure in GTK+ itself.  For the file chooser's tests, I had to
> do some manual hacks to simulate, "click this button", "find the
> dialog", "click the dialog's button"... this is tricky C code that
> assumes too much knowledge of the internals of the toolkit, and I'd love
> to write some higher-level stuff instead for such tests.  (Feel free to
> reply about this in a different thread - this could derail *this* thread
> pretty fast) :)

There are two ways to go about GUI testing. One is to retrieve the coordinates of a control and 
inject a mouse or keyboard event at those coordinates, the other is to give every control an id 
that can be used to send events to. The first is incredibly brittle and the second is AFAIK supported 
only by wxWidgets. [1]

ISTR that there was an implementation of the coordinate-tracking sort for Gtk1, but I've lost track of
it. It would be a pretty big change to Gtk to introduce control ids and event injectability.

Regards,
John Ralls

[1] http://wxguitest.sourceforge.net/