Exploring test application: IronPython (1)

How can IronPython help with exploring the test application? The answer is .NET Reflection:

Reflection is the mechanism of discovering information solely at run time.

We can discover both class and instance information. That's important. Knowing class information, we know what the object is capable of. We know whether it is a button having click method or a text edit having value property. And knowing instance information, we can find out what text the text edit displays.

That's nice but to be able to utilize the reflection, we need access to the tested application's objects from our testing framework. That's easy. The tested application is a .NET application so we can run it directly from IronPython.

When you look to Program.cs (source), you see how the tested application is started. If you don't have the sources of tested application available, you can use Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector to find the information.

static void Main()
{
   Application.EnableVisualStyles();
   Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
   Application.Run(new frmGUIAT());
}

Let's mimic the start in IronPython. We are not interested in the first two rows. The third row is the core. The Application class is part of System.Windows.Forms namespace. So we just need to create an instance of frmGUIAT class. To create it, we use method CreateInstance of Activator class from System namespace. The CreateInstance method needs to know the type of the future instance. We find the type utilizing the reflection.

The whole code looks like this:

import clr
clr.AddReference('System')
clr.AddReference("System.Windows.Forms")
from System import *
from System.Reflection import *
from System.Windows.Forms import Application

asm = Assembly.LoadFrom('GUIAT_PoC.exe')
asm_type = asm.GetType('GUIAT_PoC.frmGUIAT')
App = Activator.CreateInstance(asm_type)
Application.Run(App)

When you run the above code from IronPython console, the tested application is displayed. Note the IronPython must be started form the directiory where GUIAT_PoC.exe is located. The disadvantage is we cannot do anything in IronPython console while the tested application is running. The solution is to run it in separate thread. I will show it in the next article.