G1ANT Learning

    For Advanced

    Lesson 8/10

    CU, UI

    In the lessons for the selenium. family of commands you learned how you can select webpage elements, using their XPaths. Guess what? Similar techniques can be applied to user interface elements such as input boxes, icons, buttons, menus and so on — by resorting to their WPaths in the ui. family of commands.

    WPath is an “address” of a Windows UI element. You can easily find it with the Windows Tree panel: select Windows Tree from View menu and you will see all available UI elements in a tree. If you are not sure what a cryptic element really is, right-click it and select Highlight from the context menu: the selected element will be highlighted in the GUI.

    When you use any of the ui. commands, just double-click a desired UI element in the Window Tree panel to insert its WPath into the command as a wpath argument value.

    Let’s use couple of the ui. commands (but first, enable them by selecting the UI Addon in the Addons panel):

    program mstsc
♥rdc = /ui[@name='Remote Desktop Connection']
waitfor.ui ‴♥rdc/ui[@id='5017']/ui[@name='Show Options ']‴
ui.click ‴♥rdc/ui[@id='5017']/ui[@name='Show Options ']‴
ui.settext ‴♥rdc/ui[@typeid='50003']/ui[@typeid='50004']‴ text test.domain.com
delay 1
ui.settext ‴♥rdc/ui[@id='13064']‴ text admin

    This script is a bit mysterious, so let’s explain it:

    1. Open Remote Desktop Connection application.
    2. Declare a variable that stores the WPath root of all UI controls in the RDC window.
    3. Wait until the RDC window is fully open and Show Options button is available.
    4. Click this button to expand the window and reveal all RDC options.
    5. In the Computer: input box (for providing the remote computer address) enter test.domain.com.
    6. Wait a second to make sure the remote computer address was entered correctly.
    7. Enter admin in the User name: input box.

    Note: The names of window elements are system language dependent, so scripts with WPaths to these elements can be used only in the same language versions of Windows.

    In the next lesson you will enhance the above script with some more actions.