dppart4-generalissues-tarunlalwani

7/30/2019 DPPart4-GeneralIssues-TarunLalwani

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DP Part 4 Common Mistakes

Author(s): (1)tarun_lalwani

Written On:

Keywords:

QTP, Quick Test,

This article would go over some common mistakes people make while using

Descriptive Programming (DP) in QTP.

Using strings with Pattern

Lets assume we want to click a link Logout (Tarun) on my web page. Two

possible methods that can be used are

Method 1Browser("miccclass:=Browser").Page("micclass:=Page").Link("text:=Logout

(Tarun)").Click

Method 2Set oDesc = Description.Create

oDesc("text").Value = "Logout (Tarun)"

Browser("miccclass:=Browser").Page("micclass:=Page").Link(oDesc).Click

Now both the above methods will fail giving below mentioned error

Cannot identify the object [ Link ] (of class Link). Verify that this objects

properties match an object currently displayed in your application.

Cannot identify the link object

Looking through the naked eyes on the web page the link does exist indeed
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]://knowledgeinbox.com/wp-content/uploads/cannot-identify-object.jpegmailto:[email protected]


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So what went wrong? The problem was with the characters ( and ) present in

the text of the link we used. By default QTP treats all DP properties as regular

expression (r.e.) patterns and (xxx) is considered as a group of patter xxx. The

text Logout (Tarun) when treated as a r.e. gets a literal meaning of Logout

Tarun, and since there is no such link on the web page QTP throws an error. To

avoid such situations we need to escape the regular expression characters using

the escape character \. Now we have three different solutions to correct the

problem

Method 1Browser("miccclass:=Browser").Page("micclass:=Page").Link("text:=Logout

\(Tarun\)").Click


oDesc("text").Value = "Logout \(Tarun\)"

Browser("miccclass:=Browser").Page("micclass:=Page").Link(oDesc).Click


oDesc("text").Value = "Logout (Tarun)"

'Do not treat the value as regular expression.

oDesc("text").RegularExpression = False

Browser(miccclass:=Browser).Page(micclass:=Page).Link(oDesc).Click

IMO Method 3 should be preferred for a neater coding as we are using the actual

text of the link.

Overpopulated description while identifying objects

An overpopulated description does not help in recognizing the object. We should

use minimum no. of properties which are stable enough to recognize the object

on every single run. Consider the below overpopulated description

Set oDesc = Description.Create

oDesc("html tag").Value = "TABLE"

oDesc("micclass").Value = "WebTable"

oDesc("innertext").Value = "abcde"

oDesc("outertext").Value = "abcde"

oDesc("innerhtml").Value = "abcde"

oDesc("outerhtml").Value =

"abcde"

oDesc("rows").Value = 1

oDesc("cols").Value = 1


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Consider the following advices while create such a description

rows and cols are dynamic properties which might change if the table

gets updated. These properties should be avoided

Only one of the properties from innertext, outertext, outerhtml and

innerhtml should be used

outerhtml and innerhtml properties should be avoided as they

contains various tags and difficult to express

When using Browser().Page().WebTable(oDesc) we can skip

specifying the micclass and html tag properties also because as soon as

we enclose oDesc with the WebTable() test object these two properties

are mostly implied.

Considering the above points we can reduce our description to just

Set oDesc = Description.Create

oDesc("outertext").Value = "abcde"

Underpopulated description while using ChildObjects

Though we reduced the no. of properties in the description object when identified

a table in the last section but while using ChildObjects method we should make

sure the following

Maximum description properties should be used to reduce the final

result set. Though we should still follow the advices specified in earlier

section of overpopulated descriptions except the last one (Where we

ignore micclass and HTML tag).

When using ChildObjects to find WebElements, html tag should

always be provided to avoid errors.

Property names used in description should be as the same case

provided in the QTP help file. IMO changing the case sometimes causes

general run error during script run. Though there is no documentation

proving that description names are case sensitiveUsing Class Name instead of micclass

Dont know why by Mercury/HP preferred to show micclass as Class Name in

the object spy. This misleads many DP user to create a description with non-

existent property class name


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5/5

oDesc("title").Value = "My title"

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