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Action Recording

Action recording takes care of a weakness inherent in unit testing. Unit testing requires an exact calculation of the expected results, which can be very time-consuming. Imagine having a Find.ALL operation that returns 20 results. Finding the correct locations of all 20 matches can take a while, and doing it for an entire series of operations can take too long for it to be considered a productive activity. Action recording, on the other hand, requires no preparation and gives a visual representation of action results. Matches, mouse movement, clicks, and drags are all illustrated on screenshots taken when the actions were performed. These illustrated screenshots can then be scanned to see if the actions performed as expected.

Illustrated screenshots and the original screenshots (without the illustration) are both saved to the folder specified by BrobotSettings.historyPath. The default value is history/, which refers to a folder called history in the root project directory. For illustrated screenshots, BrobotSettings.historyFilename gives the base name of the files to be saved. The default base name is hist. For original screenshots, the base name is given by the same variable that specifies the base name for screenshots saved for the State Structure builder: BrobotSettings.screenshotFilename. The default is screen. Illustrated screenshots are saved in the format: historyFilename#-ACTION-objectActedOn. Original screenshots are saved in the format: screenshotFilename#. A history containing two actions might look like this (these are filenames in the history folder):

    hist1-CLICK-image2.png
    screen1.png
    hist0-FIND-image1.png
    screen0.png

The below image is the illustrated screenshot of a Find operation:

illustrated find

The following image shows the illustrated screenshot of a Move (mouse move) operation:

illustrated move