OpenTest custom test actors

Question

I'm really impressed with OpenTest project. Found it highly intriguing how many ideas this project is sharing with some projects I created and worked on. Like your epic architecture with actors pulling tasks.. and many others :)

Did you think about including other automation technologies to base Actors on? I could see two main groups: 1 Established test automation tooling like TestCafe (support for non-selenium gui testing could leverage the whole solution a lot) 2 Custom tooling needed for specific tasks. Would be great to have an actor with some domain-specific capabilities. Now as I can see this could be achieved by introducing another layer of execution worker called by an actor using rest api. What I mean is the possibility of using/including them as new 'actor types' with custom keywords releted.

Answer 1

Thank you for your nice words. We spent a lot of time thinking through the architecture and implementation of OpenTest and it's very rewarding to see that people understand and appreciate the design.

Implementing new keywords (test actions) can be done without creating custom test actors, by creating a new Java class that inherits from the TestAction base class and override its run method. For a simple example, you can take a look at the implementation of the Delay test action. You can then package the new test action in a JAR and drop it (along with any dependencies) in the user-jars subdirectory in your test actor's working directory. The test actor will dynamically load all the JARs it finds in there and will find the new test action class (using reflection) so you can make use of it in your tests. Some useful info and things to look out for:

• Your Java project is going to have to define a dependency on the opentest-base project (which is where the TestAction base class is implemented).
• When you copy the JAR to where your test actor is, make sure to copy any dependency JARs along with it. Please note that a lot of the dependencies that you might need are already included with the core test actor binaries (you can have a look at the POM.xml to see what they are).
• If you happen to have any dependencies that conflict with the other JARs that included with the core test actor binaries, you can apply a technique called shading to "hide" the conflicting classes under a different package name. Most of the times you're not going to need this, but if you do and you get stuck let me know and I'll give you some pointers.

Here's sample project that demonstrates how to build an OpenTest extension that creates a couple of custom keywords: https://github.com/adrianth/opentest-extension-sample

And here's an extensive video tutorial about creating custom OpenTest keywords: https://getopentest.org/tutorials/custom-keywords.html