Spy4Silk

The application is for people who use Silk4Net (https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/silk-test/overview) for automated testing. The application provide In-depth analysis of application controls and helps in finding relation netween controls.

• UseCase : The application you are going to test, uses 3rd party control inside the application, you probably needs detailed analysis to find relation between controls.

Prerequisite

• Need Visual Studio 2015 or above.
• Need valid licene for Silk. (Note I am using Silk 18.5)
• I used DevExpress to develop the app. I hope you might not need the licence.(Fingers Crossed)

How to setup.

• Load the project in visual studio.
• Edit the the Silk Configuration in Visual Studio, to add the application you need to spy the controls on.

How to use.

• Use the silk locator spy from silk, to get the xpath of the control you want to look in detail. Example of XPath: //WPFControl[@automationId='DisassemblyTreeListControl']
• Run the Spy4Silk application.
• Select the application to spy on from the popup window.
• Paste the XPath in 'Control Xpath' textbox and click proces.
• It will load all method and property details.

Features

• Property Highlight : If you process the same Xpath again in the same Tab.

  • It will show property with changed value with a Yellow color
  • It will show new property with Green color.

• Method Invoke : You can invoke a method by selecting a method

  • In case of no parameter, just click Invoke
  • In case of basic parameters (like int, string, double, char), add value in 'Parameters box and press invoke.
    • Example, I need to invoke a method of declartion: GetRowElementByRowHandle(int position) , I click the method in the list and set the value, lets say 3, in the text box and press Invoke.
    • The result of this execution will be shown, specifying the result type and value.

• XPath Tools: It will do highlight and click operation on the current xpath object.

• Property/Method Tools: It does operation on control objects in property list ( In future to add support to do operation on result of methods as well.)

  • In case, value of a property is a control type (In Silk4Net term : TestObject), you can click the property and do Click and Hightlight operation.
  • In case you want to find the details of the control inside the property.
    • Select the property and press Get Details.
    • It will open a new tab and loads all the property and method details of it.
    • You can also see the xpath also will get udpated accordingly, so that you get a track of how to reach the point. Example, when i pressed Get Details for view a new tab is added with xpath as //WPFControl[@automationId='DisassemblyTreeListControl'].View

• Xpath supports method, property, normal xpath together.

  • Example: //WPFControl[@automationId='DisassemblyTreeListControl'].View.GetRowElementByRowHandle(2) , lets look inside.
    • First it will get WPFControl having automationId = 'DisassemblyTreeListControl'.
    • View property of the above WPFControl is fetched.
    • Then the method GetRowElementByRowHandle with pararmeter 2 is invoked on control from view.
    • The details of the control from the method is populated on the table.

Note

• We used this to test an application on WPF and its used multiple 3rd party controls such as DevExpress, SciChart and few more. This helped us a lot.
• I wish SILK will incorparate this to their tools.
• Hope this helps.