When to use Visual Accessors?
Visual Accessors are designed for situations where your existing accessors are not reliable and are creating instability in your test scripts. In most circumstances your existing text based accessors are sufficient and will work well. Appvance does not recommend using Visual Accessors for all of your test scripts.
Some examples of situations in which existing accessors may be unreliable include:
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Highly dynamic webpages where updates render your existing accessors invalid. For example, the XY coordinates of a button frequently change based on updates to surrounding elements. In this case, the ability for the test script to use the image of the button, rather than its XY coordinates will not break the script after the page is updated.
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Instances where even though Fallback Accessors are enabled, they fail.
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Pages where there are no other accessors other than images.
Appvance recommends using the Visual Accessor functionality only in the following situations:
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Use Visual Accessors when your scripts cannot consistently find certain accessors or no other reliable accessor aside from images is available. As noted before, this could happen on highly dynamic webpages where updates render your existing accessors invalid.
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Because of resource considerations, using Visual Accessors may not be efficient for general or widespread use for every step in your test script. For more information see the “Resource Considerations” section.
System Requirements
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See the End-User System requirements in Appvance IQ Production System Requirements for specifications.
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Google Chrome is the recommended browser for accessing Appvance IQ.
Resource Considerations
Be aware that using visual accessors will be resource intensive in terms of script execution time, disk space usage and memory consumption. Because images are resource-consuming elements at the disk, memory, and CPU level, you have the option to enable or disable the use of Visual Accessors.
Memory Issues
If you experience memory errors when executing self-healing or script optimization with visual accessor enabled, first you can try to free up resources on your computer by closing other programs. If the problem persists please consider turning off the visual accessor option. See Enabling Visual Accessors for instructions.