[announcement] new Karate-Robot project for windows automation

[ptrthomas]

Apologies for posting here, my intent is to get the word out to those following this project. I tried sending a mail to the developers last week, but it looks like this project is not being actively maintained. But the admins here are welcome to delete this issue if needed.

I am the lead developer of Karate which is an open-source test-automation framework. I have a need for Windows automation, so very recently started exploring it. Some good progress was made, here is video proof: https://twitter.com/ptrthomas/status/1261183808985948160

The good thing about Karate is that it is a framework that already includes IDE support (including step-through debug), HTML reports and parallel execution. The Windows automation was achieved by the same JNA --> MS UIAutomationCore approach that this [ui-automation] project uses, but I think I was able to simplify the Java code a lot - which is good news for those who want to contribute and improve it. Here is the relevant code, and I think the reduction of code is at least 1:10 if not more: https://github.com/intuit/karate/tree/develop/karate-robot/src/main/java/com/intuit/karate/robot/win

Here's the draft documentation, but it will change a lot right now: https://github.com/intuit/karate/tree/develop/karate-robot

So if you like the sound of this, please get in touch and help test / contribute / improve. Thanks !

• Peter

[mmarquee]

Hi, thanks for the issue / message - I have neglected to get back to you - so I apologize for that.

I have had a look at the karate-robot project, and it looks great.

The reason that not much is going on here is that although we are using this library in my workplace every day to test our UI, we have been trying to move to appium to test our software. However, appium has it's problems and does not interact well with our legacy application, so we might come back to direct interaction using this library.

So, I don't want to delete this issue, as this is not being actively developed at this moment, but it is being used.

[ptrthomas]

@mmarquee thanks for the clarification ! and for not deleting this issue 👍 I can imagine that Appium will be tough, I quickly realized that WinAppDriver would have the same issues, from your previous posts / articles it sounds like you have Delphi in the mix, which is my situation as well ! hope to keep in touch and compare notes later

[mmarquee]

If you are using Delphi, then I have written some controls that better support the MS Automation interfaces, as the base Delphi ones don't.

https://github.com/jhc-systems/DelphiUIAutomation

[ptrthomas]

@mmarquee I think this will be very useful, I will pass this on to the dev teams and see if this can be part of the test strategy. thanks !