Starting Eclipse in the foreground

[Kev James]

Hi all,

Running on Windows 10, Jenkins 2.32.2

I'm using Jenkins to automate Jubula tests of an Eclipse Plugin I'm writing. I currently have two issues that I'm hoping someone can help with.

Firstly, when I have Jenkins running as a service, when I try to run Eclipse from the ant script that my Jenkins job runs, eclipse starts (according to Task Manager) but will not appear in my task bar or on the desktop. It just hangs.

I have tried as 'Local System Account' with the 'Allow service to interact with desktop' checked, and also with 'This account', specifying the credentials of the user who is logged in, but neither makes any difference.

Is there a way to run GUI executables from the Ant script in a Jenkins job when it's a service?

I worked around this for now, but running Jenkins from a command prompt. When I do this, Eclipse will start correctly, but it does not become the focused app. This causes a problem for the Jubula testing framework, because the framework simulates mouse clicks and typing on the AUT (Application Under Test) - so if that application is not in the foreground, the test will fail.

I have verified that the test works ok by (a) running it from the Jubula app itself and (b) clicking on the Eclipse tab in the taskbar while the splash screen is displayed, manually bringing it to the foreground.

Does anyone know a way to launch the application in the foreground?

Cheers,

KEv.