GPWindow.com - Dynamics GP- DEVELOPMENT > Testing

Testing Framework for Microsoft Dynamics GP Available!

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:03:25 GMT

Last November at the Technical Conference in Fargo, my colleague Grant and I presented a Testing 101 session. One of our main goals was to increase testing knowledge and know-how in the community as well as to provide a tool that people could use in their own environments to facilitate their testing efforts.

Our target audience for this tool spanned companies who are in all stages of testing from manual where they’d just like help getting back to a known good state to those on their way to automation with some automated tests they’d like to run all together. We are pleased to let you know that the Testing Framework for Microsoft Dynamics GP has found a home!

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/MDGPTestFramework

If you aren’t familiar with it, this framework is a collection of scripts, .out files, samples, and utilities for testing Microsoft Dynamics GP. It also includes a SQL Reporting Services test framework as well. There are several samples showing how to load data, run a macro, execute a report, save results to a file, and compare those results to a known good baseline. At the present time, the included samples and data are for Dynamics GP version 10.0 SP4. There is work being done to make a GP 2010 version of this available so please check the link above periodically for its availability.

After downloading this and giving it a try, we look forward to any feedback you may have on how we can make this a better tool for you to use.

Happy testing!
Alice

Dynamics GP Testing Framework Ready

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 12:00:16 GMT

If you're like me, you are thinking what in the heck is the Dynamics GP Testing Framework and more importantly, why should I care? The simple answer, higher quality customizations and third-party products.

The framework is a set of tools that help you automate the testing of your customizations or third-party products. If you only have manual testing of any of your customizations or third-party products, you should check this out.

Alice Newsam from Microsoft wrote a nice blog posting about the framework with links to download it. Check it out and let us know what you think.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/developingfordynamicsgp/archive/2010/06/18/testing-framework-for-microsoft-dynamics-gp-available.aspx

Pam

Microsoft Dynamics GP Testing 101 Session

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 20:21:41 GMT

After spending a great week with attendees at the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 in Fargo, I decided to try my hand at contributing to the Developing for Dynamics GP blog. I am a Test Engineer on the GP team focusing on Dexterity and as such I had the pleasure to present a Dynamics GP Testing 101 session at the Conference with my teammate Grant Swenson. So today I wanted to highlight the key takeaways from the session as well as provide links to a couple of great reference materials that are available today.

First off, when thinking about how to approach creating a test environment for your solution, take some time to identify the areas you need to test in and the starting point that can provide a good foundation for your tests. Do you need a large set of starting data or will a smaller subset do? On the environmental side, are there integrating applications, printers or things like specific date, time or currency formatting you need to utilize in your solution? Once you have identified these things, determine how you will get your system back to this starting point after testing has been done. That may mean taking database backups to restore later or using BCP to pull the data out, etc. Whatever that method is, the first critical part in starting the testing process is figuring out how to replicate and return to your starting point. If there was one piece of information for attendees at the presentation to take away it is that consistency is key. Replicating the same environment you first created tests in to rerun them and verify the results can give you a big boost towards success and make things like troubleshooting errors much, much easier to do.

Secondly, there are all sorts of tips for creating Dexterity macros or doing things like SRS testing. The main thing to remember here is that you want to start off taking small steps. Don’t try to cover every scenario and have all the data you possibly can be recorded or sent out to an output file. This gets to be quite a chore to verify and most times will leave you frustrated with the whole process. By approaching a small piece of your solution, figuring out the data you will need for that piece and then recording a macro to test that part, can oftentimes be the best way to start. It can also help you to provide some very useful feedback to the rest of the development team much sooner on the quality of a feature or product.

For those who are looking into bringing automated tests into their development environments, there are two released resources available today that can help paint the full picture of the considerations to take and how to start when recording macros for your Dexterity solutions. The first is in the Dexterity documentation. The document to look at is called the Programmer’s Guide Volume 2 and more specifically in Chapter 34: Testing Your Application. Now, if you aren’t a developer don’t be scared away by the word "Programmer’s" in the title. This is a great all around resource that describes the Dexterity macro system that can be used for business logic automation or for testing so be sure to check it out. The second resource that really pulls all the pieces together for you when starting down the automation path is the whitepaper called, "Recording Test Cases with the Macro System" (also attached). This is found on the Microsoft site and walks through the importance of creating a starting point, how to get started with macros and helpful .ini settings as well as what to do after you have created your first macros.

Check these two resources out and see if you can take the first or next step into bringing some automation into your development organization. There are numerous benefits including increasing the overall chances of having successful deployments at your site or your customer sites as well as lowering the overall cost of a project by finding defects in the solution before it goes the door. At the conference we also previewed a test automation framework sample. Stay tuned for more information to come on that once we find a good home for it to be shared with you!

Have a great day and happy testing!

Alice

Dynamics GP Testing

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 20:07:48 GMT

Everyone welcome Alice from the Dexterity testing team! She has her first blog post up at Developing for Dynamics GP. In her first post, Alice tackles test environments and testing automation options. Welcome to the conversation Alice!

Testing Framework for Dynamics GP

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:07:04 GMT

Ok I’m digging out from Convergence. Hold on to your hats because the next several days are going to be very full.

Up first is the Dynamics GP Test Framework. This is a set of scripts, samples and utilities for testing Dynamics GP that first debuted at the GP technical conference in Fargo.

Testing Framework for Microsoft Dynamics GP now available for download

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:12:26 GMT

If you happened to have attended the past Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2009 in Fargo, North Dakota, USA (David Musgrave and I co-presented 2 sessions at this conference) and also attended the Microsoft Dynamics GP Testing 101 session presented by Rob Bernhardt and Grant Swenson you may remember that they showcased a number of tools to assist in the testing of Microsoft Dynamics GP.

You will be glad to know that the toolset is now available for download on the MSDN code library, here.

If you are a Microsoft partner, ISV partner, or even a customer who happens to have a product developed, you will want to take these tools for a test drive.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com

Reset GP During AddIn Testing

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:15:06 GMT

Dynamics GP AddIns are great. You can use Visual Studio and your preferred .NET language to create powerful enhancements for Dynamics GP. And the AddIns are neatly packaged in a DLL file that you simply need to copy into the GP AddIns folder.

But, of course, there are some downsides, one of which is testing and debugging. One issue is that if you need to modify your code, you need to recompile the DLL file, close GP, copy the new DLL file, then re-launch GP. It's tedious and time consuming.

If you aren't accessing any GP windows or Dynamics objects, you can write a wrapper EXE to test your DLL independent of GP, but if you are using Dynamics objects, you need to update your DLL and test in GP. After closing and launching GP a dozen times, you'll be fed up.

Following on my solution for resetting GP when testing with Integration Manager, I've created a very similar solution for testing GP AddIn DLLs.

I needed the following:

Close GP
Copy my new DLL to the AddIns folder
Launch GP and login again

For this particular project, I'm developing on Windows 2008 with SQL 2008 and GP 10, so I noticed a few things behaved differently and had to make a few minor differences to make my prior script work. I didn't note all of the differences, but the primary issue was getting GP to automatically launch and run the login macro using the Start command, which I'm guessing is something about Windows 2008.

You will want to complete all of the same preparatory steps in my prior post, and then use the scripts below.

I used the following batch file:

C:\pskill dynamics.exe

sqlcmd -S SQL2008\GP10 -E -Q "DELETE FROM DYNAMICS.dbo.ACTIVITY WHERE USERID = 'sa'"

xcopy "C:\Users\sendow\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\MyAddIn\bin\Debug\MyAddIn.dll" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics\GP10\AddIns\" /Y

start Dynamics.exe "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics\GP10\Dynamics.set" C:\Login.mac

And here is the login.mac file that worked for me: (change the password and company ID to suit your environment)

Logging file 'none.txt'
CheckActiveWin dictionary 'default' form Login window Login
MoveTo field 'User ID'
TypeTo field 'User ID' , 'sa'
MoveTo field Password
TypeTo field Password , 'password'
CheckActiveWin dictionary 'default' form Login window Login
MoveTo field 'OK Button'
ClickHit field 'OK Button'
NewActiveWin dictionary 'default' form 'Switch Company' window 'Switch Company'
ClickHit field '(L) Company Names' item 1 # 'Fabrikam'
MoveTo field 'OK Button'
ClickHit field 'OK Button'
NewActiveWin dictionary 'default' form sheLL window sheLL
NewActiveWin dictionary 'default' form sheLL window sheLL
ActivateWindow dictionary 'default' form sheLL window sheLL

Notice that on the last line of the batch file, I had to specify the full path to the Dynamics.set file, even though it is in the PATH variable, just like Dynamics.exe.

Once the batch file has been created, just create a shortcut on your desktop or a shortcut in your QuickLaunch toolbar.

Now with a single or double click, GP is closed, your recompiled DLL is copied to the AddIns folder, and then GP is launched.

It's not quite as easy as just clicking Run in Visual Studio and debugging directly, but it saves time and alot of hassle.

UPDATE: One caveat that I forgot to mention on my prior post as well as this one: You will want to make sure and close all GP windows before running the batch file, otherwise you can end up with invalid records in your DEX_LOCK table. If you don't want to close the windows, you could add an additional line to the batch file to delete the records in DEX_LOCK.

Of course, these scripts and this process are intended only for use on an isolated development workstation and should not be used in production.

Testing Framework for Microsoft Dynamics GP Available

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 09:07:39 GMT

From Developing for Dynamics GP I see that the Testing Framework for Dynamics GP is now available. This framework is a collection of scripts, .out files, samples, and utilities for testing Microsoft Dynamics GP. It also includes a SQL Reporting Services test framework as well.

Right now the samples are for GP 10 SP4 but GP 2010 examples are in the work.