Spix

Spix is a minimally invasive UI testing library that enables your Qt/QML app's UI to be controlled either via c++ code, or through an http RPC interface.

UI elements are referenced through names and paths which are robust against design changes. To click on a button you write

mouseClick("mainWindow/ok_button");

To provide an RPC test interface to your app, only add these three lines to your main(...) function:

spix::AnyRpcServer server;
auto bot = new spix::QtQmlBot();
bot->runTestServer(server);

And a test script in python could look like this:

import xmlrpc.client

s = xmlrpc.client.ServerProxy('http://localhost:9000')
s.mouseClick("mainWindow/Button_1")
s.wait(200)
s.mouseClick("mainWindow/Button_2")
resultText = s.getStringProperty("mainWindow/results", "text")
s.quit()

What are the applications of Spix?

The obvious use for Spix is to automatically test the GUI of your Qt/QML application and make sure that it behaves as you expect. However, you can also use Spix as an easy way to remote control existing Qt/QML applications or to automatically generate and update screenshots for your documentation.

Requirements

• Qt
• AnyRPC

Current Features

• Send mouse events (click, move, drag/drop)
• Drop mime data from external apps
• Enter text
• Check existence and visibility of items
• Get property values of items (text, position, color, ...)
• Take and save a screenshot
• Quit the app
• Remote control, also of embedded devices / iOS

Building Spix

Spix uses cmake and can be build with the standard cmake commands once cloned:

git clone https://github.com/faaxm/spix
cd spix
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .

You can also have a look at the build scripts in ci/, which are run on the build server to build and test Spix.

If you installed the dependencies (like AnyRPC) in a non-standard directory you can point cmake to it by setting CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH, so instead of cmake .. you run:

cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/path/to/libs ..