Hi, I'm thinking about how to "semi automate" testing of doc files which were created by HWPF. I'll explain what runs through my mind and would like to know, if anybody has an opinion on that and which tools would be ok or not.
The first thing which came to my mind is using jacob (java COM bridge) in a Windows environment to let Winword open and save a test file. If the process doing that is still active after a certain time, the test is declared as failed and the Winword instance is killed. I'm not into COM programming and I'm not sure how much it takes to do it that way, but I'm trying. I would prefer a jacob based solution. But if for any reason jacob is not suitable, I would bet that such a thing can be created simply without using Java. It should at least be possible to run two programs and let one do the COM stuff and the other watch it. If the test program hangs, the watch program could find running instances of winword and the test program and kill them - hopefully not leaving too many resources hanging around after that. Such kind of tests obviously run on Windows only (don't want to think about remote access to a Windows machine which runs the tests and returns the results) so its not part of the unit tests. With a few dozen test cases (= generated Word files) it feels bad to open those files manually and check that they are working. (Personally I can feel my mood go down drastically when looking at 30 tick boxes on a sheet of paper representing really ugly work...) Apart from simple crashes/crashes-not testing this could be extended to a test tool checking for instance whether the bold formatting created in HWPF is really bold when asking Winword. But thats surely something to discuss after the crashes/crashes-not part is done. Now the questions: Are there any objections against such a tool in general? (besides from "only runs on Windows" :-) ) Is there a better approach for that? Should jacob not be suitable, which "development environment" would be recommended? (VC8Express, Watcom, gcc(?); don't know yet whether one needs the Platform SDK for that or not...) Best wishes, Rainer (He who is tired of the open-save-cycle and occasionally-killing-Winword-instances :-) ) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mailing List: http://jakarta.apache.org/site/mail2.html#poi The Apache Jakarta POI Project: http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/
