Package	mx.automation
Class	public class AutomationID
Inheritance	AutomationID Object

Language Version:

ActionScript 3.0

Product Version:

Flex 3

Runtime Versions:

Flash Player 9, AIR 1.1

The Flex automation framework uses the AutomationID class to build object identification that Agents can use. AutomationID consists of many AutomationIDParts, where each part identifies an object in the hierarchy. AutomationID defines a serialization format for an Array of maps. You use this class to represent a hierarchy using segments that describe the properties of each object within the hierarchy. The serialize format of the id is:

property_1_name{property_1_value property_1_type}property_2_name{property_2_value property_2_type}|property_1_name{property_1_value property_1_type}property_2_name{property_2_value property_2_type}

Consider a Flex application with following hierarchy:

Application -- > Accordion -- > HBox -- > Button

The AutomationID of the button would consist of four AutomationIDParts, one for application, one for Accordion, one for HBox, and one for the Button. AutomationIDPart is a table of property names and their values. The property-value pairs are different for different object types. These property-value pairs should be usable to identify the object uniquely.

AutomationID is created by walking the parent hierarchy of the leaf child object and creating the AutomationIDPart for each object encountered. Parents that have showInAutomationHierarchy set to false are skipped. Children of such parents are considered the children of the next higher parent whose showInAuto flag is set to true. During recording, this AutomationID can be saved by the agent.

During playback when Agent provides AutomationID for finding an object, the Display object hierarchy is walked from the top Application object downwards. At each level, a child that matches the AutomationIDPart closest is picked up from the list of all the children. If multiple children match the criteria, an error is thrown. Users are responsible to resolve such conflicts by providing a unique automationName or identifying new properties on objects which make them unique.

Agents should save the object information if they desire persistence. AutomationID provides toString() and parse() methods to convert the object to a string representation and back.

You can use the IAutomationManager.createAutomationID() and IAutomationManager.resolveAutomationID() methods to create and resolve AutomationID objects, respectively.

You can use the IAutomationObjectHelper.helpCreateIDPart() and IAutomationObjectHelper.helpResolveIDPart() methods to identify a child with in a parent which matches the AutomationIDPart.

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