What is 4Test in Silk Test?

4test in silk test is a fourth generation language or 4GL which comes under the category of the object oriented languages. This fourth generation language has been developed especially for fulfilling the needs of the quality assurance professionals. 

The 4test language possesses some very powerful features that have been grouped in to 3 basic kinds of functionality as described below:

1. A library of object oriented classes: This group of functionality includes object oriented methods as well as classes that can be used to specify interaction of a test case with the GUI objects present in an application.
2. A library of built in functions: This group of functionality includes features that are used for performing the common support tasks.
3. A set of statements, data types and operators: This group of functionality includes the features that can be used for introducing the logic as well as the structure to a data base that has been recorded earlier.

- Before the test scripts are created and run, an object repository containing the information regarding the application under test or AUT is to be used by the silk test classic. 

- This object repository consists of the descriptions of all the GUI objects that are present in the application under test or AUT. 

- The actions that are performed by the silk test on these GUI objects are recognized by the silk test based up on some methods as well as properties associated with the objects on which the actions have been performed. 

- After the identification, the actions performed are recorded and stored in the object repository using the 4test language for scripting. 

- There are several classes that are used by the 4test language and have been mentioned below:

1. Active X classes
2. Visual basic classes
3. General core classes
4. General web application classes
5. Flex class reference
6. Java classes
7. .net classes
8. Rumba class reference
9. SAP class reference
10. Silver light class reference
11. Java AWT class reference
12. Java swing class reference
13. Win 32 classes
14. WPF class reference
15. Xbrowser classes

The 4test language comes with the following in built functions:

1. Agent information functions
2. Argument pass modes functions
3. Application state control functions
4. Array manipulation functions
5. Character and string conversion functions
6. Data type manipulation functions
7. Data base functions
8. Data driven functions
9. Date and time manipulation functions
10. Distributed processing functions
11. Distributed results logging functions
12. Exception handling functions
13. File manipulation functions
14. Java functions
15. List manipulation functions
16. Locale functions
17. Numeric functions
18. Operation system calls
19. Product version information functions
20. Password encryption functions
21. Random value operations
22. Registry operations
23. Results file operations
24. Run time status messages functions
25. Script information functions
26. Semaphores
27. Set manipulation functions
28. String manipulation functions
29. SWT functions
30. Timers time date information
31. Web browser functions
32. Windows information functions
33. Date transformation functions

The 4test language comes with the following categories of keywords:

1. Arg list call keyword
2. Current file keyword
3. Current path keyword
4. Type info keyword
5. Alias keyword in type declarations

Following types of statements are found in 4test language:

1. Access statement
2. Break statement
3. Const statement
4. Continue statement
5. Critical statement
6. Exit statement
7. Do___ except statement
8. For statements
9. If statement
10. Multi tag statement
11. Parent statement
12. Parallel statement
13. Raise statement
14. Rendezvous statement
15. Reraise statement
16. Select statement
17. Setting statement
18. Spawn statement
19. Switch statement
20. Return statement
21. Tag statement
22. Use statement
23. With statement
24. While statement