iTest 3.4 Features

[AdamB]

In iTest 3.4, there are now 18 different applications that you can use for controlling devices and applications, ranging from telnet and SSH to SNMP to web to the new Database Client and so on.  But what happens when there is some new protocol or device type that you’d like to control?  When is Fanfare going to support this specialized traffic generator, for example, that you use?  Or how about that internally developed library that your team has created?  What’s the chance that Fanfare is ever going to add support for it?

Until now, your answer was Tcl.  You can access most any external functionality through a Tcl shell and because iTest has deep integration with Tcl, you always have that path.  However, the APIs exposed by most devices is optimized for those writing scripts.  Usually these are rather obscure command sets and difficult to understand.  And, after all, didn’t you buy iTest to get away from scripting?

iTest 3.4 has something that may be of great benefit to you.  We now fully support the ability for you to write your own custom tools that can integrate into iTest – with all of the same power as all of the other tools that ship with iTest itself.  You can define your own sets of actions, can create your own user interfaces, and all of this will support full automation without your users have to write any script.  Every copy of iTest 3.4 includes support for tool development.  In order to create your own iTest tool, you will need to have some Java programming experience.  You will need to download Eclipse’s Java development tools (which are available for free) and you can ask it to target your iTest installation and you will have everything you need to create your own tools.  We even have sample Java code that you can look at to help you.

This feature, of course, is not for the average iTest user.  But if your group has access to someone who can develop new Eclipse plugins (or you are willing to contract with a team with that expertise), you can create your own custom tools.  In fact, you are even welcome to sell or share the iTest tools you create!

Message Edited by BethanyW on 06-03-2009 11:26 AM

[dclaar]

Would I be able to use this to glue my xmlfind tool into iTest?

[KumarS]

I do not know what this xml find tool does. SDK for building tools is only for building new session types like "Telnet" etc... SDK is not for adding new menu items, dialogs, or views to iTest. You can do that directly by using Eclipse SDK and plugging whatever plugin you build using Eclipse SDK into iTest.

[PaulD]

I'm not sure what your xmlfind tool does, but I'm pretty sure you could make it into an iTest tool using the SDK. 

To be a tool, you will have:

• A set of session properties that define how your tool's session will be initialized.  If you don't need these, you can have none.
• A set of actions that are appropriate to perform using your tool.  In the simplest case, your tool might just have one action (but if it is truly stateless, you might find it easier to just use the Process tool to invoke your tool as a process and collect its STDOUT).  For each action, you implement a handler and populate the response, structured data, and appropriate queries.
• A user interface.  In the simplest case, you can ask iTest to create you a simple interactive command-line interface that will appear in Eclipse's console view.  But you can also choose to create a GUI for your tool's session if you want, which you would write using Java/SWT.

Once you do this, your "xmlfind", for example, will appear in the list of iTest applications (like telnet, Command Prompt, etc.) 

[dclaar]

xmlfind lets you search through XML files using XPath. I use it outside of iTest to do complicated searches; I'd like to bring it into eclipse, but haven't really done anything along that line. So I was hoping that this functionality would help me get started, but it is orthogonal to what I want to do.

Ah well, one of these days I'll find the time...