Can Jubula test Eclipse IDE as an application? - eclipse

Am I able to use Jubula to test the entire Eclipse IDE?
What I want to achieve is that let Jubula to automatically detect the actions performed in the Eclipse IDE such as "right click a project and rename the selected project". Therefore, I am able to reuse these recorded actions for my test purpose.
If it is possible, which Toolkit (rcp, swing, swt etc.) should I use for this?

Of course, it's possible.
You need to use the RCP toolkit and set eclipse.exe (or whichever your system binary is) as the AUT.
You don't want workspaces to collide: You can use the Jubula standalone or you need to run two instances of Eclipse. When you execute a Test Job, it will start the (or seek for a running) instance of the Eclipse. Thus you need two workspace folders; one for Jubula/Eclipse executing the tests, another for the Eclipse being tested.
You can use the Observation mode to detect the actions you perform. It's disadvantage is that this way your tests will be less reusable and harder to modify. If there's a change in the actions, then you better record the whole process again.
Or you can create your tests manually by adding Test Cases and controller mappings. This requires more practice/time.
If you don't want to spend much time with it then just use the Observation mode.

Related

Eclipse 4 RCP How to launch another plug in in a new window

I have an e4 RCP which needs all the screen real estate. I have developed a second RCP that is in effect a relatively simple single-function plug-in, with currently only one part. I want the user to be able to launch the second from the first, then terminate it, all on demand.
As I understand it, I have 3 options:
Launch a new workbench for the second, written as a plug-in. I assume this uses more resources and also has the problem that I need to track and distinguish events which will go to both.
Write the second as a model fragment plug-in that extends the first. This has the advantage that I can keep on adding to the second plug-in by declaration in the model editor. However, I believe this requires attaching to an existing container in the main model. I could add a new container to the main model and write code to flip containers in and out but it is all done in the model editor currently, and more importantly the functions carried out by the second plug-in are quite different from those of the first (main) RCP, so I fear the user will find the UI change confusing.
Use EModelService and write code to create a new TrimmedWindow and then child PartStack, and Part, and all the Handlers. I have not yet found enough documentation to fully understand the implications, advantages and disadvantages of this - aside from the obvious ones that the former declarations now have to be programmed and coupling is tighter.
It looks to me like Eclipse itself uses approach 1 for two of its menu items:
Help Contents
Eclipse Marketplace
From the UI perspective, the kind of UI separation of functions that I want to achieve is very much like these two items. Hence I am leaning to option 1.
Any corrections or alternatives?
You could possibly use a PerspectiveStack with two perspectives containing the windows for your two apps. The second app can be in model fragment.
You can then just use EPartService.switchPerspective to switch between them.

How to create Eclipse RCP application that behaves like a wizard?

I want create a installer by using Eclipse RCP. I need to give the user a wizard-like installer. This means user can do some options then click next. Or they can go back to previous page by click previous. Or they can cancel the installation by clicking cancel.
Here is my problem:
I don't know how to switch between views when clicking "next","previous". I need to create something like WizardPages and i can change between these pages?
I can't use JFace wizard because I'm required not to pop up any dialog.
I'm totally new to Eclipse RCP so please help!
thanks.
Maybe "StackLayout" is what you need.
Consider whether you actually want/need Eclipse RCP in this context. Eclipse RCP shines in complex applications with an extensive business domain and complex user interface.
An installer wizard, however, is very straightforward and static. I cannot imagine you requiring more than two or three user inputs. Your question is a bit like "I want to hear beautiful music. How do I program a robot to play the piano?"
It is much easier to limit yourself to using SWT and JFace. Use the JFace WizardDialog to make a nice installation wizard. You will find you will have never needed the Eclipse RCP framework.
See http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/EclipseWizards/article.html for a nice tutorial.
If you do think you need the features of the Eclipse RCP runtime framework, I suggest you follow the path below instead:
Create an RCP application (e.g. the sample 'Mail' application). A class will be created that is the main entry point in your application. This class will launch the Eclipse Workbench. Delete this code, and instead launch the WizardDialog.
A lot of things will not be available, such as menu's, views with drag-and-drop functionality, keybindings, etc. I cannot imagine you will need those things. However, you will benefit from the following Eclipse RCP features:
Eclipse launch framework. Ability to create a self-contained product including the JRE.
OSGi framework. Ability to easily add new plugins. Ability to use services, blueprint, etc.
JFace framework.
EMF (if you have a very complicated installation wizard)
All other eclipse plugins, although a lot of them may not work outside of the context of the Eclipse Workbench.
If you are convinced you need the full Eclipse Workbench, you can always do the following:
Define a 'base' perspective that is 'locked down'.
Use a Command to move from one perspective to the other. This will allow you to keep the previous wizard views open in other (hidden) perspectives.
Use Eclipse Contexts to hide all the standard Eclipse Workbench functionality, menu's, etc.
Since you are new to Eclipse RCP, I do not recommend learning the framework in the particular usecase of an Installation Wizard. You already need good knowledge of Eclipse RCP to be able to hack it this way, and it will not be a clean or nice implementation :-)

Automated testing developer environments

We use gradle as our build tool and use the idea plugin to be able to generate the project/module files. The process for a new developer on the project would look like this:
pull from source control.
run 'gradle idea'.
open idea and be able to develop without any further setup.
This all works nicely, but generally only gets exercised when a new developer joins or someone gets a new machine. I would really like to automate the testing of this more frequently in the same way we automate our unit/integration tests as part of our continuous integration process.
Does anyone know if this is possible and if there is any libraries for doing this kind of thing?
You can also substitue idea for eclipse as we have a similar process for those that prefer using eclipse.
The second step (with or without step one) is easy to smoke test (just execute the task as part of a CI build), the third one less so. However, if you are following best practices and regenerate IDEA files rather than committing them to source control, developers will likely perform both steps more or less regularly (e.g. every time a dependency changes).
As Peter noted, the real challenge is step #3. The first 2 ones are solved by your SCM plugin and gradle task. You could try automating the last task by doing something like this
identify the proper command line option, on your platform, that opens a specified intellij project from the command line
find a simple good enough scenario that could validate that the generated project is working as it should. E.g. make a clean then build. Make sure you can reproduce these steps using keyboard shortcuts only. Validation could be made by validating either produced artifacts or test result reports, etc
use an external library, like Robot, to program the starting of intellij and the running of your keyboards. Here's a simple example with Robot. Use a dynamic language with inbuilt console instead of pure Java for that, it will speed your scripting a lot...
Another idea would be to include a daemon plugin in intellij to pass back the commands from external CLI. Otherwise take contact with the intellij team, they may have something to ease your work here.
Notes:
beware of false negatives: any failure could be caused by external issues, like project instability. Try to make sure you only build from a validated working project...
beware of false positives: any assumption / unchecked result code could hide issues. Make sure you clean properly the workspace, installation, to have a repeatable state and standard scenario matching first use.
Final thoughts: while interesting from a theoretical angle, this automation exercise may not bring all the required results, i.e. the validation of the platform. Still it's an interesting learning experience and could serve as a material for a nice short talk, especially if you find out interesting stuff. Make it a beer challenger with your team when you have a few idle hours to try to see who can implement the fastest a working solution ;) Good luck!

Eclipse Debugging: Stay within boundries of current project

When step-debugging in eclipse, is it possible to instruct the debugger to traverse only steps within my project's sources?
I am debugging a rails application and much of the calls are moving through rails' infrastructure (such as activerecord) which I am not interested in following. I would prefer the step-debugger to skip these files, instead hitting the next line within my own source files.
I don't think you can prevent Eclipse to "Step into" a code, even if it isn't directly part of your project.
The only filtering in place is provided with Mylyn, in order to help you to focus on "the current task" at hand, with a "context" you help define!
It is possible in Java. I don't know if Ruby debugger in Eclipse has so mature as the Java one or not. Read this.

How to filter ressources during build in Eclipse project?

I have an application that uses several configuration files (let just consider appli.properties here).
These files contain several values that depend on the environment. We can find some information such as:
server.port=${envi.server.port}
On other side, I have a set of properties files, one per environment (dev.properties, homolo.properties, etc.).
They contain the values for some properties in configuration files. We can find here this kind of properties:
envi.server.port=4242
My build is handled by Maven2. Everything is working fine.
However, I now need to import my project into Eclipse.
My main concern is about the configuration files filtering. Indeed, if I do not modify anything in my Eclipse parameter for my project (after a mvn eclipse:eclipse command), then all my configuration file will keep the property keys (i.e. ${envi.server.port}) instead of their values. And with such configuration files, my application will not run inside Eclipse...
So I tried two solutions:
A full-Maven solution, using m2eclipse plugin. I add a Maven Builder in the project configuration, and then, each time a build is made, the filtering is done on the files.
Ant (which is only used inside Eclipse). I've hardly defined a task that simulates the Maven2 filtering of files in Ant. This task is only dedicated to the filtering, no compilation.
The common problem of these two solutions is that the filtering is made at every operation (essentially saves on Java class edition), and then take time. The second solution is however quicker (3 seconds) than the first one (more than 10 seconds).
What do you think of my approach?
How would you do that, in a better way?
If the resources are not changed that often, you can set the Maven build to only run after a Clean build, then it won't interfere so much, this doesn't do anything to speed up the build however.
As far as making the filtering quicker, I don't know of any other simple mechanism that will help, as you've said you need either Ant or Maven to run the filtering, and they both take some time to set up before building, resulting in the slow down.
If this is causing you a lot of problems, you can write a custom Incremental Eclipse builder that performs the filtering on the deltas. This should be considerably quicker, but obviously a lot more effort to write.