The Open Agent includes a sophisticated locator generator mechanism that guarantees locators are unique at the time of recording and are easy to maintain. Depending on your application and the frameworks that you use, you might want to modify the default settings to achieve the best results.
A well-defined locator relies on attributes that change infrequently and therefore requires less maintenance. Using a custom attribute is more reliable than other attributes like caption or index, since a caption will change when you translate the application into another language, and the index might change when another object is added.
To achieve optimal results, add a custom automation ID to the elements that you want to interact with in your test. In Web applications, you can add an attribute to the element that you want to interact with, such as <div myAutomationId=”my unique element name” />. This approach can eliminate the maintenance associated with locator changes.
For example, use this list to specify attributes that change frequently, such as size, width, height, and style. You can include the wildcards ‘*’ and ‘?’ in the Locator attribute name exclude list.
Separate attribute names with a comma.
Some AJAX frameworks generate attribute values that change every time the page is reloaded. Use this list to ignore such values. You can also use wildcards in this list.
Separate attribute values with a comma.
You can now record or manually create a test case.