Hi,
I have now used eggplant a couple of weeks and miss the following features:
Possibility to match of images, totally ignoring color information.
Marking an remote image and check if it is identical (or sub image) of an existing image in the image directory.
Picture renaming in image directory with automatic change in corresponding scripts.
Graphical mark of search area for a specific image
Regards
Vidioten
Thanks for posting this list of proposals. We are always interested in hearing ideas from our customers about things that could be added or improved to make Eggplant more useful to you.
- Possibility to match of images, totally ignoring color information.
This is an interesting idea, but not easy to do in the most general case. If you could email us some examples of differently-colored images that you would like to match, that might help us to understand the problem better.
This problem may be easier to solve if some constraints are possible, such as: How many colors are in each image? Two-color images are likely to be much easier than many-colored images. Will you know the colors of the image you are looking for when the script is running? For example, do you know that you want to find a particular image, but in red and blue instead of black and white as originally captured?
If one of the colors is constant, it is possible to create a masked image to use with the current version of Eggplant. This could work for cases where, for example, the image is a design that always appears in black, but the background color may vary. Or, if both colors may vary but the number of possible color combinations is relatively small, it may be feasible to solve this now using ClickAny, WaitForAny, AnyImageLocation(), etc. (I just want to be sure we’re not overlooking possible immediate solutions).
- Marking an remote image and check if it is identical (or sub image) of an existing image in the image directory.
Can you explain this in more detail? (An example, with pictures if possible, would be helpful). Are you asking to be able to compare a selected area of the remote screen to a particular existing image, but with the new capability of matching only part of the existing image?
- Picture renaming in image directory with automatic change in corresponding scripts.
Understood. We’ll make sure this is on our feature request list.
- Graphical mark of search area for a specific image
You can currently restrict the search area using the SetSearchRectangle command, or by specifying a searchRectangle in a property list. Does this look like it will do what you need? If not, please explain what you mean in more detail.
Would other people find these same features to be useful? Please let us know. If you can give specific examples of situations where you would use a feature, it will help us to understand the need for that capability.
I want only to be sure that I don’t save the save image several times (under different names)
I want to easy select the parameters to SetSearchRectangle on the remote screen.
/ Hakan
[quote=“vidioten”]2) Marking a remote image and check if it is identical (or sub image) of an existing image in the image directory.
I want only to be sure that I don’t save the save image several times (under different names)[/quote]
This is an interesting idea, but the more images you have, the longer this check step would take to carry out. You can actually write an Eggplant script to perform this check, but you’d need to execute it manually whenever you wanted to perform the check, and you’d currently need to manually determine the coordinates to check on the remote screen. The “subimage” check would be particularly difficult, since it is the reverse of the search that Eggplant normally performs. We are looking for a subset of pixels within the remote screen; your suggestion is to look at a set of pixels on the remote screen and compare it to each previously captured image to see if it is a subset of one or more of them.
One suggestion is that if you think a particular captured image might work at a particular point in your script, simply try generating the command using that image and if Eggplant can’t find it on the screen it will let you know. You can reuse an existing image by holding down the Option key and clicking on a toolbar item (such as the Click item). Eggplant will then give you a dialog that allows you to select an existing image as the target for the Click command (or whichever command you selected). Eggplant will then try to execute the command as a standard step in saving it to the script and if it will alert you if it can’t find the selected image on the screen. This gives you the chance to cancel the action and capture a new image.
[quote=“vidioten”]4) Graphical mark of search area for a specific image
I want to easy select the parameters to SetSearchRectangle on the remote screen.[/quote]
We recognize that this could be a useful feature in some cases, although it runs counter to the idea that Eggplant is not a coordinate-based test tool and it would break the resolution independence of your scripts. The best way of specifying rectangular coordinates is to base it on the imageLocation() function, using either 2 images:
put (imageLocation("CloseWindowWidget"), imageLocation("OKButton")) into mysearchRectangle
a single image and a corner of the remote screen:
put (imageLocation("someScreenElement"), remoteScreenSize()) into mySearchRectangle
or a single image and the location of that image plus or minus some offset amount:
put (imageLocation("someScreenElement"), imageLocation("someScreenElement") + (100, 50)) into mySearchRectangle
To help with specifying the serach area in this way, we have provided a library of functions that take one or more images as arguments and return the corresponding rectangle. You can find that library in the Eggplant Examples forum at http://www.redstonesoftware.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=87.
I hope these ideas are helpful. We appreciate your feedback and suggestions.