Run the screen size analysis

Introduction

When recording online (dialog) transactions, one thing that Testimony captures is the number of lines that can be displayed on a user’s screen. Since it is very likely that users will have a variety of monitors, screen sizes and screen resolutions, different users will be able to display different numbers of lines of output on their screens. Some list-based screen outputs are accessed by selecting a particular row on a screen. For example, a user may be using VA03 to display a sales order. They may use the F4 help to get a list of sales orders and then double-click on, say, the 25th row on the screen to select the sales order they want to view.

Screen resolution for bot VMs

During a playback, the bots, running on a Windows machine (usually a Virtual Machine) run through dialog transactions in exactly the same way as the users did. In our VA03 example, the bot will also call the F4 help and will also double-click the 25th row on the screen to select the sales order to be viewed. If the screen resolution on the bot VM is not set high enough, then it may be that only 24 rows can be displayed. In this case, the execution of the VA03 script will cause an Error.

*NOTE: Improvements in Testimony v2.40 in the way that Testimony handles selection from lists means that there is much less reliance than previously on the actual row in the displayed list. However, there are still some areas of functionality where the row number is important.

The program /BTI/AUT_BOT_SCRN_SIZE_ANLYSIS can be used to analyse the dialog transactions in an execution queue, and will report on the number of rows displayed on screen.

Execute the program using SE38/SA38 on the Central System and select your Test Plan and Execution Queue.

When you execute the report, output will be shown detailing different “Max Rows Displayed” and how many scripts displayed each number of rows.

In the example above, we can see that a few users had very large screens, able to display more than 50 rows in a list. However, it looks like most users had screens displaying a maximum of 39 rows or fewer. You should change the screen resolution on the bot VMs to try to accommodate as many list rows as possible. However, in most cases there will be a maximum screen resolution that can be set which may not replicate very large monitors.

*Note that if using RDP to connect to the bots, you often can’t directly change the screen size in Windows. However, you can set the resolution in the RDP config, which will take effect the next time you connect to the bot VM