Generic controls are those controls that an automated testing tool doesn’t natively recognize. They may show up with actions like LMouseClick or MouseMove on them along with the coordinates that the mouse action occurred at. These aren’t very useful when testing, as their available actions are limited and you might have to go through some extra work if you want to checkpoint data on them. QA Wizard Pro 2010 introduced a feature to change all of that.
“Control Transmutation” is our way of saying that you can change a control from one type to another. Perhaps you’re using an unusual third-party tab bar, or you’ve decided to create a completely custom check box. While many of these controls would normally be identified as generic, you can now alter that.
You can change the control type immediately after a record session, or later from the control’s Properties dialog. Each control has a combo box that allows you to change the type from the default to one of your choosing. If you change the control type immediately following a record session, the new type will be used when generating the script for that record session. This means that what might have been an LMouseClick action on a Control will come out to be a Click action on a Button control or a Check action on a CheckBox control. This new type is then saved with the control and used for all future recordings, so that you never have to set it again.
After changing a control to a new type, properties that would normally be available on that type of control will become available. For example, if you changed a Control into a CheckBox, that would make the Checked property available for use so that you could create a checkpoint to see if the check box is checked or not. Behind the scenes, QA Wizard Pro uses optical shape recognition to determine what part of the check box control is a box and if it contains a check mark. While correct most of the time, it does mean that if you use something wildly different from a check or “X” mark in the box, or a shape very different from a box, QA Wizard Pro may not be able to recognize the mark and set the Checked property correctly.
Likewise, when changing a control into an EditBox control, the Text property becomes available. QA Wizard Pro uses the OCR engine to get the text out of the edit box. This works well for most normal-looking edit boxes, but if your custom edit box has extra symbols or images within the box, it may introduce extra characters when getting the Text property. Using the OCR engine in QA Wizard Pro also requires you to have an OCR license (or an evaluation license).
These limitations also apply to the other selectable controls. There’s no risk in trying to change the type of your control though, you can always change it back. If this feature works for you, you’ll gain native support for a custom control for free.
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