Scripted GUI Testing & launching engine from command line?

[Peter W A Wood]

I always thought that LiveCode would make it easy to write scripted tests of GUI applications as it is based on messages. In fact, I’m a little surprised that there doesn’t seem to be much use of scripted testing either by RunRev or the community. I started to experiment with a very simple test, it worked a treat.

I made a simple stack called GUI.livecode with Field1, Field2 and Button. The Button script copies the content of Field1 to Field 2.

I then made another stack, TestGUI.livecode, with a single Field “Report” and the following openStack handler:

on openStack
   local tFailed = 0
   local tPassed = 0
   show stack "GUI"
   hide me
   put "testing" into Field "Field1" of card "Main" of stack "GUI"
   send mouseUp to Button "Button" of card "Main" of stack "GUI"
   if "testing" = text of Field "Field2" of card "Main" of stack "GUI" then
      Add 1 to tPassed
   else
      Add 1 to tFailed
   end if
   put "Number of Tests:" && tPassed + tFailed & return into Field "Report"
   put "Tests Passed:     " && tPassed & return after Field "Report"
   put "Tested Failed:     " && tFailed & return after Field "Report"
   show me
end openStack

This worked as I expected giving me confidence that I am correct in believing that it is easy to write scripted GUI tests with LiveCode. Whilst it is good to be able to run such tests in the IDE, I personally would also like to run them from the command line. I did try using LiveCodeServer to launch the test using GO but, as I’m sure you all know, you can’t run GUI stacks from LiveCode Server.

I guess that I can build a standalone of the Test stack that I can launch from the command line but was hoping there is an easier way. Is there any way to launch the GUI engine from the command line and automatically run a stack?

Regards

Peter