Understanding the Recovery System for the Classic Agent

The built-in recovery system is one of the most powerful features of Silk Test Classic because it allows you to run tests unattended. When your application fails, the recovery system restores the application to a stable state, known as the BaseState, so that the rest of your tests can continue to run unattended.

The recovery system can restore your application to its BaseState at any point during test case execution:

Before the first line of your test case begins running, the recovery system restores the application to the BaseState even if an unexpected event corrupted the application between test cases.
During a test case, if an application error occurs, the recovery system terminates the execution of the test case, writes a message in the error log, and restores the application to the BaseState before running the next test case.
After the test case completes, if the test case was not able to clean up after itself, for example it could not close a dialog box it opened, the recovery system restores the application to the BaseState.
The recovery system cannot recover from an application crash that produces a modal dialog box, such as a General Protection Fault (GPF).

Silk Test Classic uses the recovery system for all test cases that are based on DefaultBaseState or based on a chain of application states that ultimately are based on DefaultBaseState.

If your test case is based on an application state of none or a chain of application states ultimately based on none, all functions within the recovery system are not called. For example, SetAppState and SetBaseState are not called, while DefaultTestCaseEnter, DefaultTestCaseExit, and error handling are called.

Such a test case will be defined in the script file as:

testcase Name () appstate none

Silk Test Classic records test cases based on DefaultBaseState as:

testcase Name ()

How the default recovery system is implemented

The default recovery system is implemented through several functions.

Function	Purpose
DefaultBaseState	Restores the default BaseState, then call the application’s BaseState function, if defined.
DefaultScriptEnter	Executed when a script file is first accessed. Default action: none.
DefaultScriptExit	Executed when a script file is exited. Default action: Call the ExceptLog function if the script had errors.
DefaultTestCaseEnter	Executed when a test case is about to start. Default action: Set the application state.
DefaultTestCaseExit	Executed when a test case has ended. Default action: Call the ExceptLog function if the script had errors, then set the BaseState.
DefaultTestPlanEnter	Executed when a test plan is entered. Default action: none.
DefaultTestPlanExit	Executed when a test plan is exited. Default action: none.

You can write functions that override some of the default behavior of the recovery system.