The Object Browser Is Your Friend

For my first post, I thought I would cover the most important functional tool of TestComplete for anyone who hasn't worked with it before. The awe-inspiring, all-powerful, all-knowing "Object Browser" .

First, open up TC7, and click on the "Object Browser" tab, in the upper left hand corner of TC. On the left, you will see a list of the currently running processes. On the right, a list of elements associated with the currently selected node. These elements include attributes, methods, events, and fields associated with the node.



By default all processes are shown, minus windows processes. If you want, you can choose to only display tested applications, or display windows processes as well. The object browser lets you see inside any process and see what it contains, how it is designed, and what elements are available. For our purposes we will be working with the Page() object most of the time, but any IE/FF browser window will require you to work with the process windows, buttons, and navigation elements which are all outside of the page object. Each object in a process is classified as a TestNode in TC. This means they all share certain basic properties, and a certain set of functions that you can call.

Now, open up Internet Explorer 7. You will see another node called Process("iexplore") appear. Click on the + and look at all the "Window" child nodes. These are all the child nodes contained within IE7. These include the navigation tabs, the popup windows, scrollbars, everything. The node labeled "Page" contains all the web page information.

Left click on the Page node once, and look through the items populated in the right frame. At the top will be the "path". This is the FullName field for the node. This is the absolute path to the element, and is unique. You can use this to uniquely identify any object, in any process, web page, frame, etc. However, every time the Node gets modified, this path will change. So while it provides us with an exact location of the element right now, it may not be an accurate location the next time the page loads. Now take a moment to look through the page properties and methods. In general most web page nodes will not have Fields or Events associated with them. You can use any properties to find a page object. This ends up being a much more accurate and long-lasting approach to finding web page elements.

In fact, if you click on the "Methods" tab of the Page node, you will see many different Find methods associated with any Test Node. Each one will require different paramaters, but any can be used to quickly find the element you are interested in interacting with.


Now look at the bottom of the frame on the right. There you will find helpful information, such as what parameters each Method takes. Look through the object browser, and familiarize yourself with the basic methods. Don't freak out if there is too much to handle. My next post will focus on making sense of the object browser, using the finder tool, and figuring out how to find the elements you need to work with.