Finding components

Most of the time, you will start with a Panel or a Window instance representing a given panel or the whole application. In order to test your system, you will first need to retrieve the UISpec4J components representing the displayed buttons, tables or trees that let you interact with the application and check its status.

To this end, the Panel class provides a set of getXxx() methods, for instance getButton(), getTree(), etc.:

      public void MyFunctionalTestCase extends UISpecTestCase {
        public void test() {
          Window mainWindow = getMainWindow();
          mainWindow.getMenuBar().getMenu("File").getSubMenu("Open...").click();
          ...
          assertTrue(mainWindow.getTree().contentEquals(...));
          ...
          mainWindow.getButton("Apply").click();
        }
      }
      

Each getXxx() method comes in three flavors:

• getXxx() can be used when there is only one instance of this component type in the panel - for instance when you know there is a single Tree in the panel, or a single List in a small selection dialog
• getXxx(String name) lets you specify the name of the component to be found. For most components, this name will be an internal name assigned by the developers. For some components such as Buttons, CheckBoxes or RadioButtons, the name will be the label displayed on the component. When searching for components this way, the system will use the following priorities:
  1. Exact match for the displayed name, if the component supports them
  2. Exact match for the internal name
  3. Substring for the displayed name; if the component supports them
  4. Substring for the internal name
• getXxx(ComponentMatcher matcher) lets you define your own matching policy.

NB: It is possible to add getXxx() methods for other components than those shipped with UISpec4J. Please refer to the extension mechanism documentation for further details.