Tag Archives: windows 10

Automating the Windows 10 Desktop Calculator using PyAutoGui

Last year, I’ve tried automating a Windows 7 desktop calculator using a Java library called Winium. A year later, someone from the comments told me that the example didn’t work on Windows 10. I ignored the comment for a while because I didn’t have a Windows 10 machine to perform a test back then, but now that I’ve recently upgraded my home PC I decided to try it out.

What I found:

Running a Windows 7 desktop calculator automation example (using Winium) on a Windows 10 machine

The Windows 10 calculator opened up but the tests didn’t run properly. The error log told me that the program was unable to find the calculator elements it was supposed to click. Bummer. Maybe the names of the calculator elements were different, Windows 10 versus Windows 7? It wasn’t; the element names were still the same according to UI Spy. Perhaps there’s something from Winium that can point me to a clue? Oh, it seems that the library has not been updated in recent years.

If I can’t use Winium, how then can I automate the Windows 10 calculator? A Google search pointed me to PyAutoGui. Instead of Java, it says that I’ll need Python (and Pip) for this tool to work. And yes, being Windows, I also need to properly set the environment variables so I can use the Python and Pip commands on a terminal.

Let’s install PyAutoGui:

Installing PyAutoGui

And after writing some code, let’s see if we can automate the Windows 10 calculator with it:

Automating the Windows 10 desktop calculator with PyAutoGui. Click the image to view the GIF full-size on another browser tab 🙂

It works!

But here are some catches:

  • I had to rely on PyAutoGui’s keyboard control functions for performing the calculator actions, instead of finding elements via the user interface. Well, from what I’ve seen so far from the docs is that the only way to locate a UI element is by locating elements using screenshots. I tried that the first time and it was very flaky, so I opted for using the keyboard control functions instead.
  • The code introduces a time variable to wait for the calculator to appear on screen. The code also introduces a time variable to pause a portion of a second in-between each keyboard action so the actions don’t happen too fast for a person’s eye.
  • There are no assertions in the example code, because I couldn’t find any assertion functions I could use from the PyAutoGui docs. It is not a tool built for testing, only for automating desktop apps.

Source code for this experiment can be found on: Win-Calculator-PyAutoGui.

Post-Installation Notes after Setting-Up Cucumber-Ruby-Watir Automated Checks with Jenkins on a Windows 10 Amazon EC2 Server

Had a chance to set up cucumber tests to run via Jenkins on a Windows 10 Amazon EC2 server last week. It’s been a while since I installed everything from scratch, so that was good practice. I ran into some problems, which was a bit expected since my local setup was on Windows 7, so this post serves as a guide for possible future installations.

The process:

  • Install desired browsers where the tests will run.
  • Install Java and the latest JDK. Include the JDK path to Window’s system environment variables. This is necessary for running the selenium server.
  • Install the latest Ruby and DevKit versions, required for installing ruby gems and running the test suite.
  • Install Jenkins, which will take care of scheduling and test results reporting. Also install Jenkins as a service, to run automatically after the server boots up.
  • Install Git on the machine, and setup the credentials for retrieving the test code from the remote repository.
  • Check out the test code from the remote repository.
  • Set the selenium server to run automatically after the machine boots.
  • Install the required ruby gems using bundler.
  • Check if cucumber tests run properly by running a sample via the command line interface.
  • Create/Import Jenkins jobs for the cucumber tests. Install the Jenkins plugins necessary for test results reporting. Possibly set up Jenkins to pull the latest test code from the remote repository.
  • Run cucumber tests via Jenkins.

Some reminders for future installs:

  • Install the 32-bit version of Ruby’s DevKit instead of the 64-bit because the latter version creates problems with gem installs.
  • Windows 10 has trouble installing ruby gems (using the bundle install command) from the default HTTPS source. To fix this, replace the gems source list in the Gemfile from HTTPS to HTTP.
  • Install Jenkins using the MSI-based Windows installer on its own directory on the C drive, then install it as a service afterwards.
  • Do not install all suggested Jenkins plugins at first, especially the ones related to Git. These will break Jenkins on Windows so install only those that are actually needed for cucumber tests to run.
  • Via Jenkin’s Configure System module, set the shell executable to the location of the command line’s executable file (i.e., C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe) so that Jenkins can run cucumber tests via the default Windows command line interface. In addition, each Jenkins job Build needs to be set as “Execute Windows Batch Command” instead of “Execute Shell”.
  • Remember to change the timezone of the machine to the proper timezone.
  • Test a sample basic cucumber project first to see if cucumber is properly running on the machine before retrieving the actual test suite from the Git repository.
  • In saving the machine’s generated public SSH identification (via Putty or the ssh keygen command using Cygwin), do not include a name for the file to be saved so that the system generates the default id_rsa.pub file.