General iTest Topics

[KumarS]

I am assuming you are using "telnet" or "ssh" and you are talking about 100ms idle channel for preventing false prompt detection that these sessions tack on.

Tcl shell will not have this overhead because it has a very definite command completion which does not rely on prompts.

You can remove this 100ms overhead in telnet and ssh apps if you think that you will never have your prompt in the command body - but generally it is not advisable.

[PaulD]

You should be able to pass a big batch of data to Tcl (or another post-processor) in a single step.  You can use a scriptSet step, for example, to push a whole list of data (including lists of lists) into a variable on the Tcl side, with the output of that step being your XML.

[tlawall]

Kumar, Paul,

Thanks for the info, it's a great help in decision making for our future steps!  If there's no 100ms delay, and if we can pass a batch of data into the TCL script, then we might have our problem solved right here.  That's assuming we can cobble together the xml gen from TCL and tDOM, of course, but it's nice to know that the machinery is here for us to take advantage of.

Even if we go ahead and use TCL to do our processing, I'd still like to poke you guys about opening up that command plugin interface...   Might be useful for other non-trival tasks!

[tlawall]

One other question:

I know tDom is a package that isn't standard with TCL, and I was wondering if you have any pointers on how to integrate it with iTest.  I know that iTest has it's own internal JACL based interpreter, which is used for the "eval" actions, it also has a copy of a full JACL implementation, which you can run scripts in via scriptEval.  Is this the same that's used for doing a tclshell session?  Or is that my native TCL interpreter (assuming I have one)?

Thanks again!

T.

[KumarS]

You are better off installing a native tcl interpreter on your machine. iTest's Jacl tcl shell is Tcl 8.0 and does not have many built in commands. Also, it will not load any tcl packages which are written in "C". For Jacl to load a tcl package, the package has to be "pure" tcl. I do not know what tdom is - but I think installing a native tcl interpreter would create less hassle in the long run.

In your previous post, it seems like you are asking for ability to contribute new actions like "eval", "sleep", etc... Currently, we do not provide an API for it. But we do provide an SDK for providing your own actions as part of a Tool. For example, Telnet tool allows "open", "close", "command", "break". You can create your own tool which plugs into iTest and exposes your own actions. Only difference between these actions and others like "eval" or "comment" is that you will need to open a session to your tool. But you can have one global session for your tool and then provide any set of actions to be used in iTest. For example:

open              t1 mytool.ffsp

my_action1  t1 cmd_string_for_my_action1_to_process

You can standardize on a session id and then you do not have to pass that to your procedures and everywhere in your testcases, you can use session "t1" and the actions you defined in your tool.