Tuesday, July 1, 2008

QTP - Smart Identification

Sometimes back, I was in a QTP interview panel. Most of the candidates do not know about smart identification. That's why, I thought to write to this post.

Need of Smart Identification
Smart identification is a technique in QuickTest Professional. It is used to identify the objects, even though few mandatory properties are changed at run time.

Smart Identification Overview
The Smart Identification dialog box enables you to create and modify the Smart Identification definition that QuickTest Professional uses for a selected test object class. When the recorded definition for an object does not enable QTP to identify an option, QuickTest Professional uses the smart identification definition (if defined and enabled) to identify the object.

Smart Identification uses two types of properties:


  1. Base filter properties: The most fundamental properties of a particular test object class; those whose values cannot be changed without changing the essence of the original object. For example, if a Web link's tag was changed from <A> to any other value, you could no longer call it the same object.

  2. Optional filter properties: Other properties that can help identify objects of a particular class as they are unlikely to change on a regular basis, but which can be ignored if they are no longer applicable.


To know more about Smart Identification, You can see the QuickTest Professional Help for following topics:

  1. About Configuring Smart Identification

  2. Understanding the Smart Identification Process

  3. Reviewing Smart Identification Information in the Test Results

  4. Walking Through a Smart Identification Example

  5. Step-by-Step Instructions for Configuring a Smart Identification Definition

6 comments:

Dmitry Motevich said...

By the way, do you use Smart Identification on not?
As for me, I think that this is an "evil" :)
I prefer to disable it at all. That gives me the full control on application and accessing to its controls.

Palani Selvam said...

I am not using in the projects as it is not required. I know that It will degrade the QTP performance.

Dhanasekar said...

Smart Identification is not really smart to use. At times this may give a wrong result because the smart identification is based in assumptions.A good scenario is say we have two buttons and only one of them appears at any give time (eg logout and login).They differ only by their name.Here if you write a code to check the existence of say logout,the script will pass even if login but is present.
--Dhanasekar S

Dhanasekar said...

Decide to blog on this with a suitable example when I was entering the above comments. And here is the post http://wp.me/piI9F-71

Palani Selvam said...

Dhana,
You are right. Many QTP professionals are not using this feature as it is not required for many cases. Also it is slowing down the QTP execution performance.

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