Any further Updates to Redwood in the future

[Owen]

Greetings Redwood team.

I have been using Redwood since 2016 and has been a great addition to my QA Team.

I have been asked to look for alternatives to Redwood (Visual Studios and mstest) specifically, because the powers above feel that Redwood isn't supported enough since it has been a couple years since the last update. I am pushing back on this.

Is there another release in the future with Redwood or is it a finished product as is?

thanks

[Freddy Vega]

Greetings Owen,

As you know RHQ is an OpenSource project. As of now, we are maintaining our own version and keep adding features as they are requested by our dev teams. Perhaps you can float the idea to your "powers that be" to invest in a resource that can take ownership of the code and enhance it per your own specifications? Personally, I have found RHQ to be a very solid foundation from which to build a test automation platform on. By test automation platform I mean a system which allows you to build _ANY_ kind of test on top of it. Which RHQ does.

Other than that, I don't think the PrimaTest folks have plans on continuing to work on RHQ. But I'll let them answer that themselves :)

Hope that helps.

Freddy

[Owen]

Thanks Freddy,

I too have found this to be a very solid platform and have made minor changes to get around issues. Would you happen to know where I can get the source code for the CSharpLauncher.exe?

I would like to make changes to it but the source is not in the RedwoodHQ-master file and I can not find it on the web.

Thanks

[Freddy Vega]

Hi Owen,

No I do not. I've seen at least one other person ask about this though. We do not use the CSharpLauncher.exe and have not had to solve that problem before. I'll see what I can do though.

[Owen]

Thanks, the issue with C# code is there are no screen shots. found where they are created with the python launcher and the java launcher. I de-compiled the CSharpLauncher.exe and can not find where they do the same there. It could be that running C# actions will not  create failure screenshots.

[Owen]

Hey Freddy,

I used dotPeek to de-compile and look at the code inside the CsharpLauncher.exe file. Like I suspected, when it send the test data back to the redwood server, it does not send a screenshot. In the java and python launcher both, in the code you can see where it creates a screenshot on failures or on demand. Csharplauncher does not have that code in it.

That is not good. I may have to write my own launcher to have this functionality.

[Freddy Vega]

Hi Owen,

Pardon my late reply. Yes it does appear as that would be your best course of action. We also created our own Launcher in order to support how the JavaScript language deals with dependencies.

Freddy

[mjsu...@gmail.com]

Owen,

Did you create your own CsharpLauncher.exe to take the screenshot on failure? I could really use that functionality as well.

Thanks

On Friday, September 27, 2019 at 3:07:23 PM UTC-4, Owen wrote:

[Owen]

Not yet, I de-compiled CsharpLauncher.exe and looked at it.

The issue that I faced is that it requires access to the broweser.driver instance that is initiated when the test starts. My early attempts failed at that. Now I am a novice with .net so I am having one of our devs soon look into this. we are in the process of converting all our groovy to C# and have all that base work done. This is the next on our list. I will post back here if we figure it out.

[Freddy Vega]

Is C# mandatory as the language for the implementation of the automation building blocks? Have you thought about automating the test cases using Groovy / Java for coding the building blocks?

[mjsu...@gmail.com]

Hi Freddy. C# isn't mandatory but we've already created a few hundred scripts w/C# and our entire dev team uses C# so we have a good in-house resource for assistance, if needed. I also considered python but not having support for version 3 makes that less appealing. I did consider Groovy but I have no experience w/it and would have to learn something new. If I had a resource that catered just to creating Groovy scripts to click simple buttons and type in boxes and such that we're automating maybe it wouldn't be a bad way to go. So, I'd prefer C# but Groovy might become an option if we find the screenshot capability to be valuable enough to redo what we've done so far.

[Owen]

Same here Freddy. I have tons of groovy automation, 3 years worth. But the powers above me mandate that we move to C# so I have little choice but to change. We use Saucelabs to run our tests so screen shots are less important, but I feel it is a needed feature.

[Freddy Vega]

I agree that it is an important feature.

I don't think the PrimaTest guys are supporting RedwoodHQ any more though. So if anyone wants to do anything like that would have to be probably fork the repo and add it, then hopefully share it back :) It looks like there are two of you that have a similar use case, perhaps you can pair up and work it out. I can also participate by adding any insights into RHQ I may have gained since I've been working with it since 2016.

This call goes out to anyone else that would like to collaborate as well on adding this feature.

Thoughts?

[mikester]

I'm not a programmer but have gleaned enough of c# to automate our application. A screenshot shouldn't be difficult to figure out but I assume it will need to be sent to RHQ or saved somewhere. Freddy, can you provide any guidance on that?

[Owen]

It is not part of redwood that needs to be updated. It is the CSharpLauncher app. I have it mostly done. It currently creates the screen shot. Last step is to covert to a data file and send to the server. Hope to get to that this by the end of the week. Once done I will share the launcher app or the .net project files.

[Freddy Vega]

Technically it’s part of the Redwood system :) the execution agent.

All kidding aside I thinking would be a great contribution for the C# folks! Thanks!

Freddy

On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 18:22 Owen <owens...@hotmail.com> wrote:

It is not part of redwood that needs to be updated. It is the CSharpLauncher app. I have it mostly done. It currently creates the screen shot. Last step is to covert to a data file and send to the server. Hope to get to that this by the end of the week. Once done I will share the launcher app or the .net project files.

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[Owen]

I finally have C# working with screenshots. I have a modified version of the CSharpeLauncher app. I still want to touch it up and see if I can make it more robust. But things are good.

I will post a new thread here with more details once I have them.

[JustAskingForAFriend]

This question is specifically to Freddy, but I could use information from anyone.

We have a use case where we need to run multiple instances of the agent on the same server to report to different engine servers.  In reality, we will only be running tests from one engine or the other at any given time, so we are not concerned about the load on the agent.  We have created two folders to run the two copies of the agent from, and changed properties.conf to point to  separate ports.

When we launch the second instance of the agent, node.exe runs for a second or two and then stops.  Clearly, the agent code detects that it is already running in another instance and then stops.  We did some research on ways that node programs can keep more than one instance from running, such as starting a server, creating a named pipe, etc. and we couldn't find any code that seemed to be detecting the other instance running.

Can someone give us any insight about the possibility of running multiple instances of the agent on the same windows box.