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WebUI Test Studio comes with two options for test execution.  The first is the result of our tight integration with Visual Studio and uses MSTest.exe.  The second, and the subject of this post, is the built-in execution engine ArtOfTest.Runner.exe.  In this post we will look at all the command line options for the ArtOfTest.Runner.exe.  In Part 1 we will look at the two execution command line options as well as how to simplify working with the command prompt.  Part 2 will be dedicated to showing the flexibility of the execution engine by showing the results publishing options.

The ArtOfTest.Runner.exe is installed under your WebUI Test Studio installation directory.  If you used the default paths during installation this will be under “C:\Program Files\Telerik\WebUI Test Studio 2010.1\Bin”, where “c:\” is your installation drive.

When working with the execution engine in the command prompt make sure you always are running as Administrator and have the root directory in context as shown below so that you can call the runner directly.

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Put the Command Prompt on the hydraulic lift

It can get tedious to always have to navigate to the bin directory each time you want to make a call to the execution engine.  A great workaround to this it to register this path with windows so that you can call the ArtOfTest.Runner.exe from any directory within the command prompt.

To do this, right mouse click on “Computer” and select “Properties”.

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After the “System” screen appears, select “Advanced system settings”

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This will open the “System Properties” window.  From here, select the “Environment Variables” button.

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The Environment Variables window has two sections, the user variables and the system variables.  Under system variables scroll down and highlight the “Path” variable and select the “Edit” button.

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In the Edit screen, append the path to the bin directory to the end of the string that already exists in the “Variable value” text box with a semicolon before the path.  In this example I added “;C:\Program Files\Telerik\WebUI Test Studio 2010.1\Bin\”, notice that I added a semicolon to separate the previous path from the path to my ArtOfTest.Runner.exe directory.

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Click the “OK” button and voila, we now have access to the execution engine from any directory on our computer.  Make sure you start a new instance of the command prompt to get the updated variables.

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Time to lift the Hood

Now that we have the command prompt on the hydraulic lift it will be easier to take a look at the engine.  Let’s start by looking at the runners Help Screen.

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All of the options above can be broken down into either execution options or results publishing options.  Let’s start with the execution options.

Execution Options

First, we have the aii=[file path] and list=[file path] execution options.  Both of these options take file paths as the arguments. 

The aii option is wanting the full path to an individual test file with the .aii file extension.  This file will be located in your main project directory and under any folder structure you have created to organize your tests.  For example:

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A couple things to note when using file paths in the command prompt. 

First, always make sure to double quote the path because of the spaces in the file path.  Second, to prevent typing mistakes (and the subsequent headache) use the clipboard paste option within the command prompt window.  To find the paste option after copying the path to the clipboard, right mouse click on the top left corner of the command prompt to get the context menu where you can find the paste option.

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The second execution option is the list=[file path].  This option provides for the execution of a test list which has many tests inside it.  For more information about test lists have a look at The power of the Dynamic Test List.  Similar to the previous option, just include the file path to the test list which is a file with .aiilist as the extension.  All test lists for your project can be found under the test list folder under your project root folder.  For example:

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Both of these options can be used by themselves for execution.  After putting either option in the command line arguments simply press Enter and either your test or the test list will execute using all the default locations for outputting the results.  By default, results will be stored in the “Results” folder under the project’s root directory.

 

 

This concludes Part 1 of A look under the hood at WebUI Test Studio's Execution Engine.  In Part 2 we will focus on all the publishing options of the execution engine.

Stay tuned for more WebUI Test Studio news and features. 

And as always, let us know if you have questions or comments about any of our Automated Testing Tools.

Best Regards,
Christopher


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