When do you go for Context Sensitive and Analog recordings? What's the difference between them?

Winrunner was developed as an automated load testing tool by the firm of HP (Hewett Packard) and it operated at the level of graphical user interface layer. You must be wondering why it was operated only at the GUI level? This is so because it was possible only at this level to record as well as play back the user actions from a large number of software systems and applications just as a real world user would do.

The winrunner provides us with two types of recordings namely context sensitive recording and analog recording. 

Context Sensitive Recording

- With the help of this mode all your actions on the software system or application in terms of the user interactions can  be recorded  while physically ignoring the location of the objects (windows, lists, buttons and so on) on the graphical user interface.

- Whenever some action is performed on the software system or application which is under question, the generation of a statement in TSL takes place. 

- As the recording goes on, a unique description for each and every selected object is written to a map called GUI map by the winrunner tool. 

- This GUI map keeps within itself all the files from the test scripts created by you and maintains all of them separately. 

- Suppose you fall in a condition where you got to change the graphical user interface of your software system or application.

- In such a case you only need to update all the test scripts present in the GUI map and you do not need to perform any 1000 number of tests. 

- With such a facility you not only save time but you are also able to reuse all of your context sensitive test scripts for the future versions of your software system or application that you plan to develop further. 

- In context sensitive recording, playing or running a test is quite easy and you just need to play back the associated test script. 

- A real world user is emulated by the winrunner software by carrying out user like options such as pointing the mouse to some object, selecting or deselecting the objects, entering words from keyboard and so on. 

- The object descriptions that we earlier had fed to the GUI map are read by the winrunner and then those objects are searched in the software application under test to match.  

- The objects can be tracked even if their placements have been changed. 

Analog Recording

- In this type of winrunner recording, mostly the events like those mentioned below are recorded by the winrunner:

a)    Mouse clicks

b)    Input entered via the key board

c)   The exact x and y coordinates travelled by the mouse pointer and so on.

- While the test is executed or the test scripts are played the mouse tracks are re- traced by the winruner.

- However, one thing should always be kept in mind that winrunner is used only when the exact mouse coordinates are of utmost important to your test case and also when you have to test some drawing software application. 

- It is almost impossible to capture the GUI elements like objects and windows with the analog recording. 

- To say it simply, the analog recording holds good for the software systems and applications containing bitmap areas.

If you starting afresh with the winrunner it is recommended that you go for context sensitive recording since here you don’t have to go for exact mouse tracks.