Managing Views in ACCELQ: Keeping Your Contexts Clean and Efficient – ACCELQ

ACCELQ's strength lies in its codeless automation approach, powered by intuitive concepts like Contexts and Views. Understanding and managing these effectively is crucial for building robust, maintainable, and performant automation suites that truly reflect your business processes. This article focuses on Views, the visual snapshots of your application's UI, and provides best practices to prevent them from becoming a bottleneck in your automation journey.

Understanding the ACCELQ View

In ACCELQ, a View is a captured state of a page or screen within your application. It's a digital photograph of the UI, recording the presence and properties of interactable elements. Views help you with the creation and maintenance of Smart Locators. Each Context, representing a logical area or state of your application, can have one or more Views to account for different visual presentations.

The Challenge: The Proliferation of Views

While Views are essential, an unmanaged accumulation can lead to maintenance overheads:

Performance Degradation: A large number of unnecessary Views within a Context can slow down operating in ACCELQ project's workspace.
Increased Maintenance Complexity: Identifying the correct View for an Action becomes challenging when numerous similar or redundant Views exist. This increases the time and effort required for test updates and debugging.
Obscured Business Process Design: The clarity of your business process automation, a core value of ACCELQ, can be lost when a Context is cluttered with irrelevant Views, making it harder to understand the flow and purpose of your tests.
Wasted Storage: Unnecessary Views consume storage space within your ACCELQ project.

Best Practices for Effective View Management

To avoid these pitfalls and maintain a clean and efficient automation suite, follow these best practices for managing Views in ACCELQ:

1. Be Diligent During View Capture and Element Identification:

"Look Before You Leap": Before capturing a new View, always check if an existing View within the Context already contains the element(s) you need. Utilize the element explorer within existing Views to verify. You might be surprised to find the element is already accessible, even if the overall layout appears slightly different.
Capture Only What's Necessary: Focus on capturing the essential elements required for the Actions within that specific Context. Avoid capturing entire lengthy pages if you only need to interact with a small section.
Descriptive Naming: Adopt a clear and consistent naming convention for your Views. Include relevant information about the specific state or variation the View represents (e.g., "SearchResults_WithFilters," "ProductDetails_LoggedIn"). This makes it easier to identify and manage Views later.

2. Leverage the Power of Single, Scrollable Views:

Understand the Multi-Scroll Capture: The ACCELQ View Recorder often allows capturing multiple scrolls of a page into a single View. Utilize this feature judiciously for logically continuous sections of a page.
Exception: Internal Component Scrolls: If your application has components with internal scrollbars and you need to interact with elements visible only after scrolling within that component, capturing separate Views for those scrolled states might be necessary. Clearly name these Views to indicate the specific scrolled position.

3. Master Dynamic Element Handling to Minimize Views:

Embrace Dynamic Properties: When dealing with dynamic elements like lists of categories, product names, or frequently changing data, avoid capturing multiple Views for each variation. You can simply use element property update logic in your Actions to dynamically adapt to an instance of such elements.

4. Optimize Your Context Design:

Adhere to Context Design Principles: A well-structured Context design is fundamental to efficient View management. Follow ACCELQ's guidelines for modular Context design.
Separate Global Modals: Modals with independent global scope should generally be treated as separate Contexts. This prevents cluttering base page Contexts with numerous modal-specific Views. Conversely, modals that are tightly integrated with the base page's functionality and elements can often be managed within the same Context.
Understand Single-Page Application (SPA) Navigation: While SPAs might not trigger full page reloads and the URL might remain the same or only partially change, distinct logical pages or sections within an SPA should generally be treated as separate Contexts.

5. Implement a Regular View Purging Process:

Identify Unused Views: Periodically review the Views within each Context, and use ACCELQ View Purge feature to identify and cleanup unused Views. This proactive approach prevents the gradual accumulation of unnecessary Views.

Conclusion:

Effective View management is not just a housekeeping task; it's a crucial aspect of building a scalable, maintainable, and performant test automation suite in ACCELQ. By adopting these best practices, you can prevent the proliferation of unnecessary Views, ensuring your Contexts remain clean, your business process design remains clear, and your automation efforts are efficient and effective. Remember that a well-organized View structure contributes directly to the long-term value and maintainability of your ACCELQ automation framework.