Can GUI testing be automated?

[briantoby]

Look at wx.UIActionSimulator() (see wxdemo) to record menu presses and to see if a playback method is possible.

[briantoby]

Got started on this with some logging and "playback" exploration. This look to be very useful, but is going to need some fairly widespread code changes, I think, to capture some non-event driven parts of the GSAS-II code and to deal with modal windows. See notes in Readme

[briantoby]

This is not going to be possible, at least not in the way that I had envisioned, where command "playback" would trigger the same menu & button callback commands that are currently used by the code. There is a design flaw with that, which comes into play where the callback uses a modal dialog to get input before doing something with that input. It seems that wx.Dialog.ShowModal() works fine from a GUI callback, but cannot be used from inside a wx.CallAfter() call and it cannot be used from inside a thread, because only non-GUI code can go there.

When a Modal dialog is called, a routine to "talk" to that dialog, simulating the user actions, must be run in a separate thread. I have been able to do this in the logging branch, where the modal dialog is called by a wx.CallAfter() call and the dialog is modified to be non-modal. Where the problem comes in is with a larger routine that does multiple things, including calling that dialog. One wants to put the the outermost routine into a thread, but then there is the problem of how to synchronize the code that would normally wait until the ShowModal completes. One does not want any sort of delay to take place from inside wx.CallAfter because that freezes the event loop. One can put delays into a thread or have the completion of one task call another, but this seems to require a complete rewrite for GSAS-II handles callback for complex collections of actions.

However, I wonder, if the playback routine is run in the main thread, can that work? One would not need any CallAfter commands except during the routine that runs concurrently with the Modal dialog and then ShowModal should still work. This requires use of .Yield() to force screen updating.

[briantoby]

Nope -- while running the playback in the main thread works does work sometimes, it seems very dependent on the wait times and no setting seems to work reliably. As attractive as this option seems due to it working with the existing GSAS-II code base, it just does not seem to be something we can count on.