RPA Certification questions - Automation Anywhere

Few questions may be standard to ask in an interview or may not be. Those questions are thought and drafted with minimal explanation to face an interview. You might find few questions from AA certification as well. 


What is a Default mode of Credential Manager?
Ans. Default mode of credential manager is express mode. There are two modes Express and Manual. Both modes are for Credential Vault.



What is Credential Vault? 

Ans. Credential vault stores credentials which are encrypted using a master key.

Express mode: saves the master key and it automatically connects to the credential vault every time web CR restarts.
Manual mode: asks to enter keys every time CR restarts so that you gets connected to credential vault.
AA does NOT recommend express mode instead it says to use manual mode. It recommends you to copy the AA generated master key on Windows clipboard and save it in a secure location.
Credential vault is recommended to be used in production environment


Can we connect to We Control Room (CR) using same credentials from two separate machines on same time?
Ans. You can log on web CR using same credentials from two different machines or from two different browser on same machines but as soon  as second login takes some action first session logs off automatically.


When does session expires on Web CR?
Ans. A web CR allots a 20 minutes session window to a client and it keeps on getting refreshed for same period. It auto logs in and service runs in the background to do it. Session will expire in between if same credentials is used to login from different machine or browser.


Can I install Control Room on Windows 7?
Ans. Web CR does not operate on windows 10/7. I works on Windows server 2016 or Windows server 2012 r2. Any client has to be authenticated by Control Room.


How many recorders AA has?
Ans. There are 3 recorders in AA. Object recorder is recommended for Windows based applications. Web recorder is used for web based applications. And smart recorder can capture both windows and web applications


What are supperted browsers in AA?
Ans. Supported Browser versions
IE 10 AND 11
CHROME 49 and above
FIREFOX 45,46,47
chrome is not supported in meta bot designer.


Which SVN is used in AA for repository?
Ans. AA supports Apache subversion (SVN) . Neither visual nor tortoise.


How many users can connect to one AA Client License?
Ans. When we create client user on CR, it asks the role of the user so you can assign three role as Developer, Run-time or None.
Developer is to create bots.
Run-time is normally used by support/operations team to measure performance etc. It's read only mode.
None is nothing. When selected to any machine it would be unusable however could be in use by changing in dropdown.

How to get text from FlexElement using RiaTest

Find below the solution to get text from any element from Flex window:

Suppose you have an element to get text from. First find it’s parent element and locate your targeted element by any element property (id, class, location ).
e.g.

var confirmationText = FlexCanvas("Home Page")->new Locator({id:"messages"})=>text;

to check value returned:
trace(confirmationText)


Cheers!

Automatic mail generation with attachment irrespective of development language

Hi

I came across a very old and very interesting tool called 'BLAT' which facilitate to send an email with attachment. Using BLAT you need not to worry about the development language.
BLAT provides blat.lib, blat.exe and blat.dll so we can use whatever we want.

I use EXE file and can use this either from ANT or command line. following is an example to use it via ANT:




cheers!
Vaibhav

Marathon Setup

I Got an opportunity to explore Marathon tool for automated testing. I found Marathon is good tool to automate Java application (Only Jar files) with little dependency :)

Marathon works like IDE so we only need to install is Java to run our application. So just download Marathon setup from http://www.MarathonTesting.com and unzip it to your willing location. Once you run marathon.bat file it will allow you to create new project. Fill up the required field with your Jar file path and start automating your application. Marathon allows you to use either Ruby or Python to script.


What I told so far is described on Marathon official site so what this blog post is about? Ok then check below the real time scenario.

Now I found a problem to setup individual machine for number of Automation resources and let them work at the same time on same codebase. Solution of this problem is to break down marathon setup so that I can set it up on server and check into the subversion. By doing this we can checkout code from Repository and start writing automation script.


So I create new directory structure as per my need. Find below very basic structure to make Marathon work:

- Marathon
1. build – build files
2. lib – copy Jar and jython from extracted Marathon source
• vldocking_2.1.5C.jar
• rmi-lite.jar
• sampleapp.jar
• marathon-runtime.jar
• marathon-ruby.jar
• marathon-python.jar
• marathon.jar
• looks-2.2.0.jar
• junit.jar
• jline-0.9.93.jar
• jedit-textArea.jar
• jaccess-examples.jar
• jaccess.jar
• forms-1.2.1.jar
• copy Jython directory version is 2.2 in my case
3. TestCases – regression test scripts
4. RegressionReport – regression report location (You can pass this location as an argument.)
5. Copy Marathon.bat

Double click on Marathon.bat to run Marathon ide. You will get an expected error because we have changed Jar’s location. Let’s change configuration of marathon.
Open Marathon.bat into notepad and change the “CLASSPATH” as per expected location.

%DIST% - is the location where you Marathon file resides.

So change all Jar file location to the right path (lib/). Now Marathon.bat



Cheers!
Vaibhav

Time to move ON!!!

I leave BR Office by mid of July, Which would be equally sad as it is exciting. So much has happened here over the last two and half years and I have been really honored to be a part of that. Indeed, I am leaving BR– sort of.

Most of the people here couldn’t fail to notice that I am running very late in the office to achieve something. Well somehow I have achieved this from last two projects in Brickred. I am working alone on standalone application in publishing domain and its really interesting and exciting. I have learnt much but found not the right technology to work on. Now, I have made decision to move out.

I would love to keep working, if possible, with some people in near future. I learn best when working with great people (Sayantam, Daisy, Rob Styles, Glemser US Team) on their own projects, and don’t want to stop that diversity and opportunity, so hope will get a call if some interesting stuff comes up!

From August I will be working full time on Automation, let’s see what happens when it is not just a hobby business.

Dealing with SSL certificates while running selenium tests with Firefox-3.x

Selenium works without any problem if application does not use HTTPS; but as soon as application goes to the HTTPS URI on the same host everything goes unexpected. As Selenium effectively runs Firefox with a new profile every time, you potentially lose every certificate exceptions you might accept.

One technique is to create a custom profile; run Firefox using that profile; browse to the HTTPS URL and accept the exception into that profile; then close the profile. So accepted expectation would not be asked to accept again if we use same profile.

Following are steps to setup profile and some more hack to make accepted certificate available:

1. Start Firefox with the profile manager: firefox -ProfileManager
2. Create a new profile. You'll be prompted to choose a directory for the profile.
3. Select the profile and run Firefox using it.
4. Browse to the HTTPS URL (with self-signed certificate) you're going to be testing against.
5. Accept the self-signed certificate when prompted. This creates an exception for it in the profile and Close the browser.
6. Go to the Firefox profile directory and delete everything in the directory except for the cert_override.txt and cert8.db files.
7. When you run your Selenium server, pass a -firefoxProfileTemplate /path/to/profile/dir argument to it. This tells Selenium to use your partial profile with certificate exceptions.

In this way selenium would not ask you to accept any certificate once you accept against this profile. Do not forget to use same profile while run selenium. Have a look at beautiful code calling your profile:


The Ant task above, with this option, looks like this:


Outside of Ant, the command might look something like:

java -jar path_to/selenium-server.jar -firefoxProfileTemplate /path/to/profile \
-htmlSuite '*chrome firefox-bin' http://host.com testSuite.html seleniumResults.html


Cheers!!!

Logical (condition and loop) opertaion within ANT file

Wondered over how to make logical operation in ANT code. As ant code is not object oriented so one can not directly perform logical operation within this code. So I have added a jar file "ant-contrib".


Now I can write some magical code to handle selenium Regression test execution. The syntax of writing ANT is slightly different. check out another image:


That code did whatever is expected to be done. Magically done :)

Cheers!!!
Vaibhav