Find by automationId problem

[Larry]

Hey all,

I'm running webaii against a silverlight 4 application and I'm seeing a weird case where my testing framework hangs trying to find a FrameworkElement by automationId.  My test basically looks like this.

try

{
string automationID = "MyAutomationID";


Console.WriteLine("Find the element by automation ID");

FrameworkElement element = Application.Find.ByAutomationId(automationID);

Console.WriteLine("Found element");

}

catch (Exception e)

{

Console.WriteLine("Caught Exception: " + e.Message);

}

I can see the log before the find but I don't see the log after and I don't see the log from the catch.  This doesn't seem to happen all the time and seems to be an intermittent failure.  I have three different test boxes that run against different browsers and this issue only happens on the test box that runs against Internet Explorer.  Eventually the MSTest framework hits its timeout and the tests move on.  Have you heard of any failure like this?  Do you have an idea on what might be "hanging"?  Let me know what info you might need to help discover the problem.

Thanks!

[Larry]

Quick update.  I actually seen this fail on my FireFox tests as well so it's not specific to IE.  One thought I had, if our application tossed an exception at the right time, would that cause webaii to appear as if it hung? 

[Cody]

Hello Larry,

This is an interesting report. It makes more sense it would happen on all browsers rather than just one specific browser (since Silverlight has its own run time engine that runs independent of the browser).

At this point now we can't think of any possible way that the Find.ByAutomationId could hang as you describe. Not even if your application throws an exception. No matter what we should either time-out or return. We have put in so many error catching that it should be impossible for it to hang and not time out like that.

Is there anyway you can help us repro this problem?

All the best,
Cody
the Telerik team

[Larry]

I'm not sure there's a way to replicate the problem unless you completely setup a similar environment.  I could maybe describe what our app and testing framework is doing at the time we see the issue?

[Stoich]

Hi Larry,
   it's going to be extremely difficult getting a repro like that.

Instead would it be possible for you to give us the test in questions and allow us to run it against your app? This mean that you'll have to grant the the necessary rights to access to app.

Greetings,
Stoich
the Telerik team

[Larry]

I can't give access to our app.  But we have seemed to fixed the problem....although I don't fully understand the reason.

In our testing framework we use Visual Studio's class TestContext to write out our logs.  We put a bunch of TestContext.writelines in our framework to help debug problems, this coincides with the time frame of our tests stalling.  We replaced the TestContext.writelines with Console.writelines and we no longer see this problem occurring.