Locating the Unlocatable elements with logical keywords

recently completed the setup of a new test automation framework for a legacy Swing application. One of the biggest challenges I faced was locating Swing components. These components are created by a proprietary framework that doesn’t allow assigning unique names to them. Writing multiple loops to locate elements wasn’t a feasible option due to the high development and maintenance costs.

To overcome this, I used an alternative approach to locate components logically. The solution involves describing components based on:

1?? The Swing hierarchy

2?? The visual location of the component

Look on the login window below:

For example, to find the JTextField next to a JLabel, I would use the following locator logic:

import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JTextField;
import javax.swing.JLabel;
import static SwingLocator.And;
import static SwingLocator.isShowing;
import static SwingLocator.instanceOf;
import static SwingLocator.hasText;
import static SwingLocator.overlapsHorizontally;
import static ComponentUtils.findComponent;  // Explicit static import for findComponent

public class DemoApp {
    private JFrame demoApp;

    public void setPassword(String password) {
        JTextField passwordField = findComponent(
            And(
                isShowing(),
                instanceOf(JTextField.class),
                overlapsHorizontally(
                    isLabelWithText("Password")
                )
            ),
            demoApp
        );
        passwordField.setText(password);
    }

    private Object isLabelWithText(String text) {
        return And(
            instanceOf(JLabel.class),
            hasText(text)
        );
    }
}        

I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly tests can be created using this approach and how stable they are. Developing this test automation framework from scratch took me three months of dedicated effort.

This also reminded me of my experience years ago working on Selenium tests for an endurance company. I faced a similar problem there with a proprietary framework that made locating elements very challenging. A logical description for locating elements, like the one I’ve used now, would have been incredibly helpful back then!

To analyze the Swing hierarchical structure for this project, I used Swing Explorer, which made the process much more manageable.

It’s been an exciting and rewarding journey to bring automation to a legacy system!

#TestAutomation #Java #Swing #LegacySystems #AutomationFramework