Oxford Automation Sprint - 2009

Gnome Menu Application Launching

• Assignees
  • cgregan
  • jcollado

Specification for Automation

• Desktop
  • Dynamically collect the applications in the gnome-menu
  • Generate scripts based on the app names collected
  • Execute generated scripts
  • Report any failures in app launch
  • Report any failure in app close
• Future
  • Extend test depth to exercise more app functions

Problems found

• Accessibility information

  UNR launcher doesn't provide accessibility information so it's not possible to automate the task of collecting all the applications for which there's an icon that might be clicked using LDTP. Bug#341048 has been opened, but this won't be fixed, at least in the short-term, because launcher is based on clutter, which doesn't provide any support to add accessibility information. As an alternative, the desktop-switcher application has been tried to get the menu information from the standard ubuntu menu. Unfortunately this information is not available also in the version included in jaunty so this solution isn't acceptable for now.

  The only feasible solution at the moment seems to be parsing .desktop files in /usr/share/applications using gnome-menus and call the applications using the Exec tag from those files to launch the application. This solution should work, but it must be noted that the automated tests won't check that the click action in the menu icons work. In addition to this, it seems that no gnome-menus python wrapper is currently available so some work must be done to get the application information available in python scripts.