This tutorial will show you how to create, run, and modify tests for an example Tk application. In the process you will learn about Squish's most frequently used features so that by the end of the tutorial you will be able to start writing your own tests for your own applications.

This chapter presents most of the major concepts behind Squish and provides the information you need to get started using Squish for testing your own applications. This tutorial does not discuss all of Squish's features, and those that it does cover are not covered in full detail. After reading this tutorial we recommend reading the User Guide (Chapter 13), and at least skimming the API Reference Manual (Chapter 14) and the Tools Reference Manual (Chapter 15), so that you are familiar with all the features that Squish has to offer, even if you don't need to use them all straight away.

This tutorial is divided into several sections. If you are new to Squish (or to the new IDE introduced in Squish 4), it is best to read all of them. If you are already using Squish you might want to just skim the tutorial, stopping only to read those sections that cover any new features that you haven't used before—or you could just skip straight to the User Guide (Chapter 13).

Whenever we show how to achieve something using the IDE we will always follow with an explanation of how to do the same thing using the command line tools. Using an IDE is the easiest and best way to start, but once you build up lots of tests you will want to automate them, (e.g., doing nightly runs of your regression test suite), so it is worth knowing how to use the command line tools since they can be run from batch files or shell scripts. (Note that we use the new IDE introduced in Squish 4 throughout the tutorial. The old IDE is still packaged with Squish and so is still available; however, we recommend using the new IDE.)

For this chapter we will use a simple Address Book application as our AUT. The application is shipped with Squish in squish/examples/tk/addressbook.tcl. This is a very basic application that allows users to load an existing address book or create a new one, add, edit, and remove entries, and save (or save as), the new or modified addressbook. Despite the application's simplicity, it has all the key features that most standard applications have: a menu bar with pull down menus, a toolbar, and a central area—in this case showing a table. It pop-up modal dialogs for adding and editing items. All the ideas and practices that you learn to test this application can easily be adapted to your own applications. And naturally, the User Guide (Chapter 13) has many more examples and shows how to test lots of Tk-specific features, as well as all the standard editing widgets.

The screenshot shows the application in action with a user adding a new name and address.

The Tk addressbook.tcl example.

Using the Examples

The first time you try running a test for one of the example AUTs you might get a fatal error that begins “Squish couldn't find the AUT to start...”. If this occurs, click the Test Suite Settings toolbar button, and in the Application Under Test (AUT) section choose the AUT from the combobox if it is available, or click the Browse... button and choose the AUT's executable via the file open dialog that pops up. (Some versions of Squish will automatically pop up this dialog if no AUT is specified.) This only needs to be done once per example AUT. (This doesn't arise when testing your own AUTs.)

In the following sections we will create a test suite and then create some tests, but first we will very briefly review some key Squish concepts.