The importance of settings – A QTP Experience

It might sound odd, but it is interesting. The settings that need to be made on the tool before starting the automation session, is really important. It becomes more important when we talk about the automation of applications built with complex objects, for example: ActiveX controls.

ActiveX components are nowadays very common in most of the applications that we come across. The automation scripts that we create on our application are meant to be running across different platforms. But many a times, we forget to keep the settings of the tool same in different environments. The result is awful! We end up disturbing the script multiple times at multiple places, and yielding no result.

I shall share one of the experiences that I have faced myself with QTP. It was at this time when we were trying to automate this product which was declared an unfit candidate for automation, by its makers. Now, after the efforts of a day and half, we were in a position where we had one of the most complex parts of this application automated and displayed to the required. But when it came to running the script in a different work station, we failed. QTP threw an “Object Unidentified” error again and again, till we finally figured out what the real issue was! The issue was that, we forgot to set the “Record and run test on any open Windows-based application” option to be selected. Now see, how annoying it is to have missed out such a simple setting, resulting in wastage of a lot of time! So I would certainly advice you to keep a look at the environment settings on the work station that you are about to run your script. Man, the tool settings though simple, are important enough to make your life complex, at times!