I have some scripts (AutoIt) browsing YouTube for list of trending videos etc. It involves no mouse clicks (just keystrokes). The script takes a long time to finish and I can't use my PC during this time (it needs the window activated to work on it).
Is there anything I can do about this? Can these scripts run from a server or some stuff like that?
I've run into a similar problem: got to run automation with AutoIt on a Windows Server and the whole thing had got to be headless. Using Remote Desktop simply didin't work because then I'd had to keep a client opened and maximized all the time.
Short solution: install a VNC server in the Windows Server, open a client from another computer, log in and close the client. As the AutoIt script was being started by a Jenkins job, before closing the client the Jenkins applet had to be started via web interface.
By the way, I've had this idea from this post: How to run remote headless GUI automation.
As Johannes said, AutoIt probably wouldn't be suitable (and likewise AutoHotkey), but you could check out the many GUI and web testing frameworks that exist for other languages. With some of those, you can run a "headless" browser (a program that navigates the web just like a browser, but has no visible window); or you can run a standard browser on a virtual display like a Xvfb X11 server. This would be easiest if the server (or wherever it's going to run) is running a Unix-like OS, but it may be possible with Windows too.
Selenium Webdriver seems to be a very popular choice for scripting and testing actual browsers. It's natively Java but has bindings for languages like Ruby. It can also hook into something called HtmlUnit, which is also Java; that's one of the more popular headless browsers. Another (a relative newcomer) is phantom.js, which is in Javascript but (again) has bindings for other languages.
As far as I know this will not work unless the user account is logged on. You could try to see if you could convert it to an exe and run this as a service, but even then I don't think this will work. Let me know if you found out!
You can either:
Hide your window (SetWindowState #SW_HIDE) or something like that...
and use ControlClicks (if the they are original controls!)
or
Hide your window and use SendControl
or
use SendKeepActive
or
use OLEObjects like ie.au3 for automation.
Good Luck
Related
I have a project that requires automating a process on a website (login, click buttons, make decisions, etc.).
Ordinarily I would use something like curl to do the automation and not worry about the UI at all, however this site uses ASPX and redirects and is just a mess, so I need to write something like a selenium test to do it.
A selenium seems like a bit of a hack though, so I was wondering if there is any alternative or tool that may be better than selenium at walking the dom and "clicking" elements?
Guidance or examples appreciated.
A non programtic way would be to use Selenium IDE. Basically you record the events via a Firefox extension and can replay easily. I understand this is a non automating way as it requires a manual playback.
However one element that I really like is that I can use this extension to record my events and then generate scripts to automate playback via Selenium Remote Control drivers.
Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium
scripts. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to
record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire
Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back
tests in the actual environment that they will run in.
Yes I know you think selenium is a hack but it is rather pretty good!
Here's what I want to be able to do:
Run a program on my local computer which logs in to a citrix server (using citrix receiver or doing so in a similar way), on the server in the citrix session open a web browser, load a website, and then bring the html of that site back out of the citrix session and onto my local computer. Bascially I want to get data out of a citrix remote session.
How can I do this programmatically?
I'm fine with whatever programming language/modality you are comfortable in answering the question using.
I've looked a little into the citrix apis but while I find some things about logging in and even sending keystrokes and mouse clicks I found nothing about obtaining data. I could just log in and then use a program like wireshark to get the information, but I'm guessing it's all encrypted (plus then I wouldn't be doing my task all programmatically). I know of at least one open source program which seems to be able to replace a citrix reciever/client (openthinclient.org) but before I got digging through all its source code to try to answer my question I thought I'd ask here in case someone had an easier answer.
If all you want is to automate the task, is having the program act as a citrix client necessary?
I assume you don't have install privileges inside your citrix session, so are unable to install one of the many automation tools available (such as http://docs.seleniumhq.org/)?
Given the above...
If you have/allow java on your local machine, have a look at http://www.sikuli.org/
The main difference between this and other automation tools I've come across is that Sikuli uses the image on screen to navigate the gui, rather than grabbing calls to the widgets (which wont work in a citrix session).
So, assuming you can take a screenshot of your citrix session, it could be useful to you.
I've been working on a webdriver framework for a while now, I guess it is
keyword driven now. We would like for there to be a central place for users to
store tests, preferably on a wiki, but then when they are run they would open up
the browser on users local machine.
I originally started working using Fitnesse, which works great for storing the
tests however when we hosted it on a server when a user tries to run a test it
opens the browser on the server which the user can't view. Does anyone know a
way that I could force Fitnesse to open the users local browser or display the
browser to the user? Or do you know another framework/way to store tests in a
central place but run them in local.
I've been looking at sending through the local users ip through a fixture to start up the initial framework, I was hoping that fitnesse would already know the ip.
Thanks,
James
You can either find a framework that does what you want, or the bare minimum would be to create a thin wrapper that copies the test dll's and executeable to a machine and executes psexec to execute the tests on the remote machine. You could probably write the entire thing in maybe 20 lines of code.
We have Xserver-less CentOS system for continuous integration. So no UI.
I want to run selenium test cases on it. I am using new Alpha version of Selenium2 which has WebDriver integration. It starts and ends browser by its own. Now, How do I start that in background? Something similar is possible with Internet Explorer?
I am able to run correctly on local machine. But it opens Firefox UI.
Are you able to run a virtual frame buffer? That way, all the GUI programs can believe there's graphics happening, even if there's no actual screen. You may wish to search for the term "headless". One example.
Another possibility may be to use Celerity - a ruby-based "headless browser". It uses the Watir interface (originally a competitor to selenium), which I understand to be merging with webdriver.
I'm executing selenium tests with testng, that are started on a remote system with Selenium RC via hudson (with ssh connection). The remote system is windows xp with MKS Toolkit installed, hence ssh. Tests are NOT executed as a windows service.
I've tried using both captureScreenshot and captureEntirePageScreenshot methods. The first one always produces a black image. The second one creates the correct screen shot but it only works on Firefox and our tests usually pass on Firefox and fail in other browsers, so it is crucial to capture screen shots for the other browsers (mainly IE and Safari). The tests are ran in parallel, with many browser windows open at the same time. I'm not certain if this is what's causing the problem. Any thoughts will be appreciated.
Unfortunately screenshots in Selenium have been problematic from the start in browsers that are not Firefox. This is something that we Selenium Developers have been working on for a while to correct.
The latest work has been updating Snapsie to work in IE. There is a blog post at http://blog.codecentric.de/en/2010/02/remote-screenshots-mit-selenium-und-dem-robot-framework/ that explains what has happened.
I have noticed that if the screen isn't active, i.e. the screensaver has kicked in, it can produce black screenshots.
Edit:
I just had a thought. You can always run Castro to video record your tests and then watch it play back. This is something SauceLabs use to run Selenium in the cloud.
Write a method for this and call that whereever you need to take the screenshot. Use the java.awt package which has been used in selenium. For example, check this site
After setting Windows Auto-Logon, and launching process not as Windows Service, I found how to solve the Remote Desktop with Black Screenshots problem of IEDriverServer.exe, by creating a batch file that disconnects RDP, instead of closing the RDP session with the regular X button:
%windir%\system32\tscon.exe %SESSIONNAME% /dest:console
See more details here:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/24529629/658497
(Although, I would prefer there was a way to run it as the default action, when terminating RDP session with X Windows button).