MFC Feature Pack and Ranorex : Object Identification and Technologies

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Hiya

Our AUT GUI is built with menu components from Microsoft MFC Feature Pack 2008
However Ranorex doesnt see these controls
Will support be added in the future?

Regards

[Support Team]

From what I know, Ranorex does see the individual controls, but often can't recognize any elements inside them. For example, Ranorex recognizes toolbars and ribbon groups, but not the individual toolbar items or checkboxes inside a ribbon.

IMHO Microsoft did not actually make an automation vendor's job easier with that MFC Feature Pack release. They spared MSAA support all but completely and their controls do not react properly to standard window messages, either. If you know a way to enable MSAA support for those controls (like all former MFC controls had), object recognition would be much better

I added a feature request to improve support for MFC Feature Pack 2008 controls to our issue database.
We have not got any other requests for those MFC controls, yet. So, if you read this forum post and you want Ranorex to add better support for those controls, please post a short request to this topic!

Regards,
Alex
Ranorex Support Team

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Also bear in mind your competitor "Test Complete" has released a version with support for these controls

See : http://www.automatedqa.com/products/tes ... -controls/

[Support Team]

Also bear in mind your competitor "Test Complete" has released a version with support for these controls

Well, they claim to, but actually their object recognition is not better than Ranorex', rather the contrary (e.g. the don't recognize tree items, but Ranorex does). As far as I know, what you can do with TestComplete, though, is accessing some internal variables in the MFC controls. That might help for white box testing.

Regards,
Alex
Ranorex Support Team

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Yes true, seems microsoft forgot MSAA for these controls
For us we are using the toolbars, menu's from this library, and towards the end of the year the ribbon bar too

In terms of ranorex roadmaps, is there a user voting system whereby we can vote on what new features should be implemented?

[Ciege]

Once, long ago, in a test automation tool far far away (Rational Robot) they actually included a component that while in the testing phase you could compile into your AUT. Robot could then interact with that component who in turn would communicate with the AUT under the covers to return information about the AUT that MFC hid.
I'm not advocating that solution as it was a painful process to get development to include that in a project and usually the first thing to get blamed for a bug (since everyone knows development never has any bugs!)... But it did the job when needed...

[dbo]

Our main applications that we have to test are all using the ribbonstyle. For us it would be really important that Ranorex will support all of this elements.

[Liam]

Currently our AUT is changing to use menu components from Microsoft MFC Feature Pack 2008. Does Ranorex plan to support this in the near future?

Thanks...

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Hiya,

Our developers managed to expose the MFC Feature Pack ribbon bar control to MSAA identification
Works quite well...
Can't really tell you how they did it - but maybe your developers could do the same

Cheers

[Support Team]

Our developers managed to expose the MFC Feature Pack ribbon bar control to MSAA identification

Could you be so kind and ask your developers on how they exposed MSAA for your MFC Feature Pack controls, please? Would be interesting to know whether there is an easy way to do that. That could be helpful to a lot of people in the Ranorex community.

Regards,
Alex
Ranorex Team