Referring to windows and components in WebCream
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WebCream allows referring to windows and components such as buttons and text fields of your application using names. This can come handy when configuring application properties or fine-tuning multi-threading. Because names are used as entries in configuration files, they follow the general rules of identifier naming for example they can not have spaces. If a name has spaces, the spaces are replaced with underscores (_). For example to refer to a window with title "Please Login" you would use Please_Login. Leading and trailing spaces are simply truncated, so " Please Login " is still referred to as Please_Login.
Referring to windows
Windows are dialogs and frames displayed by the application. You refer to windows using the title that is displayed
in the title bar of AWT or Swing window. The reference can be a substring of the window title, so if the title of
your window changes depending on the server state or the host the client is connected to, you can use the part of the
title that is constant. Regular expressions can be used for the ultimate flexibility (see more below).
The table below shows examples of window titles and valid references to it
| Window Title | Valid Reference |
| Login | Login |
| Please Login | Please_Login .*Login |
| Login to ACME.COM | Login_to_ACHME.COM Login_to_ * |
| ACME.COM - Please Login | Please_Login |
Referring to components
In order to refer to a component you have to specify the window it is in, and an identifier which will be a component
name. The general format for a component reference is <window-reference>.component.<component-name>.
Window references are described above. Component names depend on the component type and are obtained using the table
below as a guideline
| Component Type | html.humanComponentNames=true | html.humanComponentNames=false |
| javax.swing.AbstractButton (JButton, JRadioButton, JCheckBox, JToggleButton) | getText() | getClassName() + hashCode() |
| java.awt.Button | getLabel() | getClassName() + hashCode() |
| javax.swing.JMenuItem | <submenuId>.<itemId> | getClassName() + hashCode() |
| java.awt.MenuItem | <submenuId>.<itemId> | getClassName() + hashCode() |
| All other java.awt.Components | getName() | getClassName() + hashCode() |
Menu items follow a slightly different
naming scheme. Instead of relying on the menu item text, indexes of submenus and menu items are used to uniquely identify
the item. The easiest (and probably the only sensible) way of finding out what those indexes are is to let WebCream generate
a page for the window with the menu, and then look at the page source. Find the text of the menu item and look at the
doSubmit() JavaScript function. As a parameter it takes the action string that contains menu indexes. Take that string
and replace / with . and you are good to go.
All other components can be referred to
only if they have been given a name using setName() method of java.awt.Component. If no name has been given to a component,
WebCream will automatically name it based on the class and a hashcode. However, those names are not consistent and can
be different each time you restart the application. The table below shows some examples of referring to components in
a dialog with title "Login" with humanComponentNames=true
| Component type | Name text | Reference |
| javax.swing.JButton | OK | window.Login.component.JButton_OK |
| javax.swing.JToggleButton | Tracing Off | window.Login.component.JToggleButton_Tracing_Off |
| javax.swing.JMenuItem | Exit the application | window.Login.component.JMenuItem_2.3 |
Regular Expressions
WebCream supports regular expressions in defining window and component names. For instance, to refer to all
windows that have "Save" in their title ("Confirm Save", "Save", "Save Record") one can use
window.*Save.*
For instance, to enabled all buttons with "Save" or "save" in the title ("Save Person", "Do you want to save?")
that are in a window with "Save" in the title one can use
window.*Save.*.button.(S|s)ave.enabled=true
To enable dynamic events for all components of class MyButton one can use
window.*.component.MyButton.enabled=true