What is the built-in recovery system in Silk Test?

With the in – built recovery system of the silk test automation tool it has been made possible to restore the application under test to its stable state which it was in before it crashed, failed or hanged. The stable state to which the recovery system of the silk test restores the application under test or AUT is called the base state of the application software. 

The test automation counterpart of the silk test i.e., the winrunner does not support this feature. The recovery system comes in to action whenever the application under test fails ungracefully. 

For client server based applications there are 4 major tasks that are carried out by the built – in recovery system of the silk test. Those 4 major tasks have been listed below:

1. Ensuring the continuous running of the web browser.
2. Restoring the application back to its default size if it has been minimized by the user.
3. Setting the working status of the application as active.
4. Closing the other dialog boxes or child windows that have popped up.

On the other hand the below mentioned are the tasks that are carried out by the built – in recovery system of the silk test for the application software that are browser based:

1. Waiting for the browser to restore itself to the active mode if it has been inactive for a long time.
2. Ensuring that the various below mentioned elements are displayed:

a)   Status bar

b)   Text field

c)   Location

d)   Browser tool bars and so on.

- The data regarding this built – in recovery system is stored in a file by the name of defaults.inc which can be found in the same directory where the silk test has been installed. 

- Most of the actions that are carried out on the application under test are when the application is in the default base state. 

- In this state, all the actions are based up on the default properties.

- So, whenever a test case or script is executed the recovery system gets invoked automatically.

- However, the flow of control is different when the tests are run based up on some main function or a test plan. 

- Here, when a test case starts executing via the silk organizer the same test case gets the control first. 

- But before the execution of any test case, a function is called namely “default test case enter”. 

- This function is called with the purpose of calling the set app state function which in turn will invoke the default function “default base state”. 

- Following this the execution of the test case begins. 

- In any of the either cases the control is passed to the default test case exit function:

1. If the test case finishes with its execution or
2. If the test case encounters an error while execution

- The default test case exit function keeps the record of the logs for the exceptions in the test case execution and later calls the set base state function which in turn calls the default base state function. 

- Whenever the tests are run via a main function instead of one two recovery functions are invoked in the same way. 

- But here the difference is that instead of calling default test case center the function called is “default script enter” before the scripts start running. 

- The value of this function is NULL by default. 

- When the last test case has finished executing the “default script exit” function is called. 

- The purpose of this function is to log the errors or faults that occurred outside the test case.