UI Testing with Eclipse Jubula: Preparing the Test Object (1)
Recently, Bredex created an interesting product at the Eclipse Foundation: namely, Jubula, a tool for UI testing Eclipse RCP, SWT, Swing and web applications. Basically, I guess this will become the “community edition” of GUIDancer, which is good enough for me, considering the dire need for any free UI testing tool for RCP, SWT or Swing at all.
I won’t go into comparisons with other tools in this post, but in short, imho, though there may be better tools for web testing, though there may be alternatives for Swing testing, though there may be better commercial tools for testing RCP and SWT, when you’re looking for free tools for testing RCP/SWT, I think you should start with Jubula.
Unfortunately, working with Jubula turns out to be a bit unwieldy at first. – So I’ll try to give a detailed step-by-step guide to your first GUI test automation with Jubula here, using a simple Eclipse RCP sample project as the test object.
So, let’s start with setting up the test object first: Open up Eclipse and create a new plug-in project (File/New/Project…/Plug-in Development/Plug-in Project):
Next, tell Eclipse that it’s a rich client application:
And finally, choose the “RCP Mail” template:
Now, let’s see what we’ve got in our workspace:
Hey, wait, what’s that, warnings about raw types? – We can’t tolerate that. I’ll quickly fix these by turning the List into a List<TreeObject>:
That was easy. Actually, why do they have these warnings in their sample code at all? – Anyway, what’s next? Right, let’s try if it works:
Looking good. This should be simple enough for our first steps, yet complex enough to play around a bit. – However, for exporting the application, we’re missing a product configuration (File/New/Product Configuration):
Alright, now we’re set for exporting the RCP application as Eclipse product (File/Export…/Eclipse product):
Finally, we’re done with preparing our test object. Or are we?
Actually, we’re not, unfortunately. The reason for this is that sadly, the Eclipse JFace/SWT libraries haven’t got any easy way to access/instrument them for automation on the fly (unlike Swing).
So, Jubula has to somehow hook itself into our RCP application, and we have to help with that: Look for the archive rcp-support.zip in your Jubula installation directory and extract it into your product directory. This will add a Jubula instrumentation plugin to your product.
However, that’s not all. You’ve still got to activate that plugin, and you can do that by editing the configuration/config.ini file in your product directory. There’s a long line in that file listing the osgi.bundles, and you have to add the Jubula plugin at the end:
Phew. Now we’re really really done with preparing the test object. Of course, for real projects, you’ll probably want to automate all these preparations in your build.
Let’s start up Jubula and do some testing! – Or wait, actually, let’s do that in my next blog post. 
WindowTester is now free, too. It is an excellent tool, IMO. The former Instantiations product (now owned by Google) can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/javadevtools/download-wintester.html
Indeed. I know about WindowTester (however, it’s only “free as in beer”, if I’m not mistaken), and there’s always SWTBot, too. – I’m half planning to post the same kind of tutorial, exercising those two alternatives, too.
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Hi, great Intro…
if you got a p2 conformant RCP the jubula rcp plugin should be installed via p2 update site. I created such a site if you want to test it you can access the it here:
http://dev.viper.sc/viper.updatesite/thirdparty/indigo/jubula/
I didn’t categorize the site, therefore you have to uncheck group items by category.
Cheers,
Veit
Thanks for your article!
I have a question. You state “imho, though there may be better tools for web testing”. Although you don’t want to get into comparisons, I wonder what tools you would suggest. Selenium seems to be the most widely used, but I miss parameterized test cases and reuse of test cases in other tests. Do you know of a functional web testing tool that provides these kind of things?
Thanks,
Maarten
[...] can start your testing exercises. All the post-installation steps are pretty well described in the UI Testing with Eclipse Jubula: Preparing the Test Object article, so you may dig for details there, I just want to focus on differences with Q7. Jubula [...]
[...] a start, I’ll stick to a nice blog http://jmhofer.johoop.de/?p=97 I found. Also, the CI setup seems well explained [...]
Hello,
I am trying to follow your instructions for Jubula but I am getting stuck. I have Eclipse 3.7.1 with Subclipse and Jubula plugin installed.
I am trying to create the plugin project and have gotten to the dialog where I have to choose yes “Would you like to create a rich client application?”
When I click on the Yes radio button, it greys out the “Next” and “Finish” button. Do I need another plugin? I can’t continue on with your tutorial.
Is it insufficient to download the plugin? Do I have to do the standalone download to get everything to work?
You have to install the “Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment” and “Eclipse RCP Plug-in Developer Resources” plugins from the Eclipse update site.
Hello,
Is it possible to update these steps? I am using Juno (RCP and RAP) Build id: 20120614-1722 and I already have an RCP4.2 Application. I want to use that instead of the mail template. What do I do?
The other thing is this rcp-support.zip. I can’t find it anywhere.
Thanks