Hi!

The scope of this may be different than what I understood, but if it isn't:
doesn't the ECL language used in RCPTT already support many of the
requirements? https://www.eclipse.org/rcptt/documentation/userguide/ecl/

best regards,
Vlad


On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 9:04 AM, Hallvard Trætteberg <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Christian,
>
> A quick comment on this, based on experience from a student who worked on
> a similar problem. In his case (a smart Eclipse tutorial), he wanted to
> recognize that a certain sequence of steps had been taken, and if not
> provide means of doing it for the user.
>
> - Events can be thought of as lexical (keyboard and mouse), syntactic
> (enter text, select item, click button) or semantic (invoke action or
> command). The lexical and syntactic events often correspond to SWT's. It's
> not always clear which of these you want in a specific case. Syntacic er
> normally better than lexical, but you need to capture both and know how
> lexical events where translated to syntactic by a widget.
>
> - Inputs occur in an input context (provide by previous output), and when
> replaying you need to ensure the context is correct, e.g. has had time to
> appear. This can partly be done by capturing widget life-cycle events, but
> isn't easy.
>
> Even if Eclipse (SWT + JFace + the workbench) was built with this in mind,
> it would be difficult. My personal conclusion after watching my student
> struggle with making sense of the Display event stream, is that a UI
> scripting DSL is needed for automation, rather than relying on capturing
> events. It would have constructs for describing and waiting for output,
> e.g. window with three labels and input fields, and input, e.g. enter text
> in the second input field and click OK button:
>
> require output (waiting 10 seconds):
> Window {
>   Label, TextField,
>   Label { text: "name"}, TextField is tf,
>   Label, TextField,
>   Button { text: "OK" } is ok
> }
> provide input:
> tf.input("Hallvard")
> ok.click
>
> With EMF, Xtext and Xbase it shouldn't be that difficult to make a
> prototype... Some capture mechanism could be helpful for generating
> fragments of such a script, but in general a person would need to validate
> and most often edit it.
>
> It's certainly an interesting task.
>
> Hallvard
>
>
> On 16.06.15 20:21, Christian Pontesegger wrote:
>
>> Brian, you are right. Also for mouse events it would be extremely hard
>> to replay them. Just a small change to the perspective layout or timing
>> constraints for eg popups would make it extremely hard to replay such
>> macros correctly. What I am thinking of is a recorder that tries its
>> best to figure out what a user does. so instead of recording a click on
>> the file menu and afterwards a click on the Import... item I would like
>> to map this to a command execution of the import action.
>> This is an idea I am playing with for a long time without finding a good
>> solution to this. Maybe there is none. However your key recorder is one
>> step in the right direction.
>> I will keep you informed when I start to play around with these things.
>>
>> Christian
>>
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>
> --
> Hallvard Traetteberg, Associate Professor
> Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences (IDI)
> Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
>
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