Ranorex

Wesley · Joined: 21 May 2008 Posts: 2

My boss has asked me to research products that can be used by our product to interface with another system on a remote computer that does not have an API for us to use. Ranorex seems to fit the bill for this--we can build an interface that communicates with this system by means of the GUI--but my boss believes that he has seen a product like this that presents a "web service wrapper" for other programs (such as our own) to communicate with programs on the machine in question.

Without such a product, we will have to write our own. This is possible, but rather expensive. I haven't explored Ranorex very thoroughly as of yet, but it doesn't seem to have this web service wrapper--am I missing something? My boss is quite certain he has seen a product like this, but I have thus far been uniformly unsuccessful in finding something that does. In fact, I've had a very hard time finding a product that even vaguely does what Ranorex does--much less one that has a web service wrapper!

So, a couple of things: First, great job on this tool! My rudimentary experiments barely scratched the surface of what it's capable of, but even from that I could see the excellent quality behind it. Second: Is there actually a web service wrapper that I'm just not seeing? If there isn't, is there a product somewhere that does?

Thanks for your replies!

daluu · Joined: 12 Jun 2007 Posts: 10

I'm guessing not a the moment, but since Ranorex is based on .NET, it saves you some effort in wrapping the GUI automation with a custom written .NET (or Python) web service since the GUI automation is in .NET code.

Wesley · Joined: 21 May 2008 Posts: 2

So I figured--I wrote a web service over lunch to test it out, and it works beautifully so long as the service doesn't attempt to use mouse commands (any clues as to why this doesn't work?). Regardless, I was able to build a web service application that operated SciCalc on a remote computer, and a client application to consume the service, in about 45 minutes--it would seem to me that this is the best route to take.

jasong · Joined: 26 Oct 2007 Posts: 49 Location: Texas

Hi Wesley,
I am very interested in this solution as well.

I am curious, does this approach launch the app in a window or is it merely calling the code? I ask this because it would need to be in an instance of the GUI in order to register mouse clicks (at least as far as I understand it).

Jason