Deprecation notice

Please note that the underlying White framework has been deprecated (Dec 2019). That means we will stop developing this wrapper library and encourage users to migrate to other tools. Please check White automation framework project page for suggestions.

Introduction

WhiteLibrary provides the means to automate Windows GUI technologies with Robot Framework. WhiteLibrary wraps the White automation framework.

Supported technologies include:

• Win32
• WinForms
• WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation)
• SWT (Java) platforms

Installation

Stable version

Installing the latest stable release:

pip install --upgrade robotframework-whitelibrary

Release notes

Development version

Installing the version containing the latest updates in master:

pip install --upgrade --pre robotframework-whitelibrary

Documentation

• Keyword documentation

GUI inspection

Item locators can be found using a GUI inspection tool, for example Inspect.exe or UIAVerify that are included in Windows SDK.

Windows 10 SDK: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/windows-10-sdk

Select at least the following features in the installer:

• Windows SDK Signing Tools for Desktop Apps
• Windows SDK for UWP Managed Apps

Windows 7 SDK: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8279

Support

• Robot Framework Slack channels
  • #whitelibrary
  • #whitelibrary-dev (development related discussion)
• Bug reports and feature requests to issue tracker

Development environment

This section contains instructions for developing WhiteLibrary.

Prerequisities

• Install NuGet Command Line Interface (CLI) to install required DLL packages (TestStack.White and Castle.Core).

• Install Python, if not already installed. Versions 2.7, 3.5 and 3.6 are supported at the moment.

• To install Robot Framework and Python for .NET, run

  pip install robotframework pythonnet

  or alternatively you could use the provided requirements files (requirements.txt or requirements-dev.txt):

  pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

• To make modifications to and build the test application (UIAutomationTest.exe), install Visual Studio. The test application is a WPF application developed with C#.

• If you want to edit Python with Visual Studio, Python Tools are required. They're part of Visual Studio 2017 installer, see details about what to select during installation: https://github.com/Microsoft/PTVS

  WhiteLibrary installation

• To install WhiteLibrary from source, in the root folder of the project run

  local_install.cmd

Building the test application

Open UIAutomationTest\UIAutomationTest.sln in Visual Studio and build the solution in Visual Studio. This will create the executable used in the Robot test suite, UIAutomationTest\bin\Debug\UIAutomationTest.exe.

Running tests with Robot Framework

• To execute the test suite against SUT, in the root folder of the project run

  robot --outputdir output --exclude no_ci --loglevel DEBUG:INFO atests

• To execute a single test case called "Example Test Case", run

  robot --outputdir output --exclude no_ci --loglevel DEBUG:INFO -t "Example Test Case" atests

• The test suite tagged with no_ci will run tests against the old (Win32) version of Windows calculator, and is typically excluded from test runs.

Running Static Analysis

Project relies on flake8 and pylint for static analysis. In order to run those locally, one has to install them (automatically installed if dependencies are installed via requirements-dev.txt):

pip install flake8 pylint

to run either one, go into to root of the project run execute analyzer, like this:

flake8
pylint src/