Running Eclipse Plugin Tests with SWTBot in Headless Mode

This is a followup to my previous post on SWTBot. Headless mode is very useful in running tests outsode of eclipse through Ant or from the command line.

Headless?

Well, it's not exactly headless. A better title would be "running Eclipse Plugin Tests with SWTBot with Ant or From The Command Line." The tests are not run from an Eclipse workbench, but they require Eclipse, and actually open up a workbench when they are run.

Install

Here's the place to start: http://wiki.eclipse.org/SWTBot/Ant

Download the "Headless Testing Framework" from here: http://www.eclipse.org/swtbot/downloads.php and install it into your eclipse /plugins dir. You need to install both the junit4.headless and optional.junit4 files. For example:

org.eclipse.swtbot.eclipse.junit4.headless_2.0.0.371-dev-e34
org.eclipse.swtbot.ant.optional.junit4_2.0.0.371-dev-e34.jar

Important note: Be sure to install only these files for either JUnit3 or JUnit4. If you install the files for both versions of JUnit, you'll see many class cast exceptions.

Configuration

Be sure to define a class to serve as a test suite for your tests. For example;

package org.company.test;

import org.junit.runner.RunWith;
import org.junit.runners.Suite;
import org.junit.runners.Suite.SuiteClasses;
 
@RunWith(Suite.class)
@SuiteClasses( { TestPositive.class, TestNegative.class })
public class AllTests {
}

Setup

Export your plugin tests (as a plugin) and install it into the /plugins directory of your eclipse installation.

Running with Ant

Build a build.xml file that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

<project name="testsuite" default="run" basedir=".">
    <property name="eclipse-home" value="/opt/local/eclipse_swtbot/eclipse" />
    <property name="plugin-name" value="org.company.test" />
    <property name="test-classname" value="org.company.test.AllTests" />
    <property name="library-file" value="${eclipse-home}/plugins/org.eclipse.swtbot.eclipse.junit4.headless_2.0.0.371-dev-e34/library.xml" />

    <target name="suite">

        <property name="jvmOption" value=""></property>
        <property name="temp-workspace" value="workspaceJuly23" />
        <delete dir="${temp-workspace}" quiet="true" />

        <ant target="swtbot-test" antfile="${library-file}" dir="${eclipse-home}">
            <property name="data-dir" value="${temp-workspace}" />
            <property name="plugin-name" value="${plugin-name}" />
            <property name="os" value="linux" />
            <property name="ws" value="gtk" />
            <property name="arch" value="x86" />
            <property name="classname" value="${test-classname}" />
            <property name="vmargs" value="-Xms128M -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -Xmx512M" />
        </ant>
    </target>

    <target name="cleanup" />

    <target name="run" depends="suite,cleanup">
    </target>

</project>

Important note: The supported values for os, ws (workspace) and arch are:

os: win32/linux/macosx
ws: win32/wpf/gtk/cocoa/carbon
arch: x86/x86_64

Important note: Be sure to specify a non-existent workspace name for temp-workspace as this will be overwritten when the test is run.

Running from the CLI

export ECLIPSE_HOME=/opt/local/eclipse_swtbot/eclipse
export TEST_CLASS=org.company.test.AllTests

java -Xms128M -Xmx368M -XX:MaxPermSize=256M -DPLUGIN_PATH= -classpath $ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.101.R34x_v20081125.jar org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main -application org.eclipse.swtbot.eclipse.junit4.headless.swtbottestapplication -data workspace formatter=org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.junit.XMLJUnitResultFormatter,$ECLIPSE_HOME/$TEST_CLASS.xml formatter=org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.junit.PlainJUnitResultFormatter -testPluginName org.jboss.qa.guvnor.egt -className $TEST_CLASS -os linux -ws gtk -arch x86 -consoleLog -debug

Test Output

It can be hard to find in all the output, but it's there:

Testcase: checkPerspective took 3.529 sec
Testcase: canConnectToRepo took 5.784 sec
Testcase: goIntoBackHomePropertiesTest took 34.526 sec
Testcase: doubleClickTest took 51.74 sec
Testcase: cannotConnectBadPath took 6.701 sec
Testcase: cannotConnectBadPassword took 7.747 sec

Other Useful Links

Ketan added some movies to the SWTBot site in July 2009. Here's one on running SWTBot from Ant: http://download.eclipse.org/technology/swtbot/docs/videos/beginners/SWTBotHeadlessTestingForNovices

Another DZone post!

The recent post on Gateways and Notifiers in the SOA Platform was just reposted to DZone here:

http://soa.dzone.com/news/soa-platform-gateways-and

A new post for the SOA Platform blog

Just added a new post here: http://jboss-soa-p.blogspot.com/2009/07/soa-platform-gateways-and-notifiers.html

Listeners and notifiers are very useful things to integrate apps together through the platform. They are actually easy to use, and are very powerful too!

My first post to DZone!

And - the nice folks at DZone picked up the Content Based Routing post too:

http://soa.dzone.com/news/when-content-knows-way-content?mz=3006-jboss

Another post to the Red Hat / JBoss SOA Platform Blog

I just finished my 2nd post to the SOA Platform blog here:

http://jboss-soa-p.blogspot.com/2009/07/when-content-knows-way-content-based.html

The diagram towards the end would have really helped me understand content based routing when I first heard of it. Maybe this will help some other newbies along the way... ;-)

Filling in the Hole in the UI Automation Tool Set

I've never been much of a UI test automation person as I've generally lived on the server-side of things. But, the past couple of years, I've found great set of open-source UI testing tools. In the past few days, I've found a tool that fills in what had been a gap in test tool coverage - automating Eclipse plugins.

The set of tools consists of:

For GNOME Applications - Dogtail

Dogtail developed by Zack Cerza and is written in Python (as are the tests that you write with it) and can be used to automate GNOME-based applications. The design of Dogtail is very interesting as uses accessibility technologies to communicate with desktop applications. It uses accessibility-related metadata to create an in-memory model of the application's GUI elements.

Dogtail can be found here: https://fedorahosted.org/dogtail

(There's also an entry in Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtail that has links to the user documentation that I wrote for Dogtail. This was published as a series of articles in Red Hat Magazine http://magazine.redhat.com)

For Web Applications - Selenium

With Selenium, you can record or write test scripts that manipulate the web application to be tested through the browser. The tests can be written in HTML or Java or Python or other languages. There's also a record/playback mechanism.

Selenium can be found here: http://seleniumhq.org

For Eclipse plugins - SWTBot

I recently was able to fill in a long-empty hole in this set of tests when a co-worker of mine pointed me at a new tool named SWTBot. SWTBot is developed by Ketan Padegaonkar and automates Eclipse plugin testing.

SWTBot can be found here: http://www.eclipse.org/swtbot

SWTBot makes it very easy to build Java tests for Eclipse plugins. Here's a test code fragment that creates a new project:

SWTWorkbenchBot bot = new SWTWorkbenchBot();
bot.menu("File").menu("New").menu("Project...").click();
bot.tree().select("Java Project");
bot.button("Next >").click();
bot.textWithLabel("Project name:").setText("testProject");
bot.button("Finish").click();

SWTBot is very new; it's in the incubation phase of its development as an Eclipse project. The only problem that I've had with SWTBot so far is that it took me a little while to locate a set of example programs. I did find a good set here: http://code.google.com/p/swtbot-examples

So - to sum things up, with these tools, there's test coverage for desktop, web, and Eclipse-based apps. And that makes for a great tool-set!

Contributing to the Red Hat / JBoss SOA Platform Blog!

Just added a new post to the JBoss SOA Platform blog here:

http://jboss-soa-p.blogspot.com/2009/06/hanging-together-on-soa-platform.html

There's a feed for it here: http://www.jboss.org/feeds/view/soap?from=0

'Hoping to contribute to this blog on a regular basis going forward...


(No - you're not going blind - the same post - the subject is integrations - was in this blog until a few minutes ago. ;-)