Today’s autopilot release provides a new feature for test case writers. Unless the widget you want to test has a direct object name (GtkBuilder ID/Qt objectName), it is often not that easy to find a widget in a deeply nested hierarchy in autopilot vis.

With the new version, if you have some parent widget (like the containing dialog) w in your test, you can now call w.print_tree() to dump the paths and properties of that widget and all its children to stdout. That’s easy enough to grep, so provides a “poor man’s full tree search”. You can also specify a different output sink, like a file object or a file name: w.print_tree('/tmp/dump.txt').

This is a first step towards making it easier to find widgets and properties you are interested in. Arguably this is mostly just a crutch, but I found it to be rather effective. Before this feature I often wrote little snippets like in LP#1241312, now this becomes much easier. A better solution for this would certainly be a “full tree search” in vis itself, but that’s not that easy to implement. It is on the roadmap for this cycle, though.

I am also currently working on a real-time property change monitor for autopilot-gtk, which may also help in some cases. Unfortunately we cannot build such a thing for autopilot-qt, as due to the nature of Qt object properties, changes of them cannot be monitored.