Problems testing Win32 application with WhiteLibrary

[chrisfetz (Christoph Fetzer)]

Hi!

I’d like to test a win32 application using robotframework. The library of my choice would be FlaUI but as the selection of keywords seems still to be very limited I started with WhiteLibrary.

To get used to it I started a very simple test and that does not work with an error that does not help me.
Here my test:

 *** Settings ***
Library    WhiteLibrary

*** Test Cases ***
Klicker
    Launch application    notepad.exe
    Click Menu Button    text:Datei

The test starts properly (Notepad opens), then I get this error:
"AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'Get'"

Some information about my tools:
I am working with python 3.8.10, robotframework 4.1, WhiteLibrary 1.6.0

I am editing the tests in Eclipse 2021-06, RED Plugin 0.9.5
In RED I have another problem: auto keyword expansion does not work and the syntax check tells me, WhiteLibrary would be missing, however during auto-exploration of the imported libraries, Whitelibrary is detected, added to the list but is displayed as “non-accessible” there. I am not sure if both problems are related.

If you are missing more details, please simply ask.

I also found the Slack channel of WhiteLibrary however I can’t create an account there. Any idea how to create that?

Many thanks in advance!
Best regards,
Christoph

[René]

Hallo Christoph,

I can not really help with WhiteLibrary, but:

Eclipse RED Plugin is not compatible to Robot Framework 4.x
You have to downgrade it to RF 3.2.2 or change the Editor.
If you want to change Editor, i can recommend Visual Studio Code with the Extension “Robot Framework Language Server” by RoboCorp. Alternative is PyCharm with “same” plugin.

Robot Framework Slack Channel can be accessed by an invite, that you get, when you type in your Email address here: invite to the workspace.
This link is also at robotframework.org under Community

Viele Grüße
René

[chrisfetz (Christoph Fetzer)]

Hallo René,

thank you very much for the inspiration. RED works since downgrade of Robotframework. unfortunately I did not find any documentation of that limitation with RED but that is another story.

I’ll proceed to the WhiteLibrary slack channel and try to get my issues solved there.
Thank you very much!

Viele Grüße,
Christoph

[damies13 (Dave)]

Hi Christoph,

You probably want to be aware of these 2 posts:

Automating Desktop Application by using Robot Framework

but there are generic windows UI libraries available, like WhiteLibrary. Afaik, there is nobody maintaining WhiteLibrary anymore and then there is this pull request: https://github.com/Omenia/robotframework-whitelibrary/pull/174 TestStack.White has deprecated and that means our maintenance will also stop.

Automating Desktop Application by using Robot Framework

Hello all I am the author and maintainer of FlaUI (and previous maintainer of White) and I just got notified about someone who started a FlaUI wrapper for robot framework. See https://github.com/GDATASoftwareAG/robotframework-flaui Give it a go and return feedback if you have any. Regards Roman

I don’t have much experience library, but I did use FlaUI once very briefly in my last week of a previous role as an experiment, it work well for the windows app I asked it to interact with and WhiteLibrary didn’t work with that “Metro” app, that was with RobotFramework 3.1.? before RobotFramework existed.

I never used RED, so no idea if it works with that.

Hope this is helpful,

Dave.

[chrisfetz (Christoph Fetzer)]

Hi Dave!

Thanks for your support as well! I was aware of your cited post. However the functionality of FlaUiLibrary is pretty poor compared to WhiteLibrary. I installed both and am playing around with both at the moment.

With support from the Slack channel I got a step further: I missed an “Attach Window” because I missinterpreted some documentation that with “Launch Application” the window (instead of process) would be attached automatically.

Thanks!
Christoph