Using one variable for multiple items data in descriptive programming

Question

I know that with Descriptive programming you can do something like this:

Browser("StackOverflow").Page("StackOverflow").Link("text:=Go To Next Page ", "html tag:=A").Click

But is it possible to create some kind of string so I can assign more than one data value and pass it as single variable? I've tried many combinations using escape characters and I always get error.

For example in the case above, let's say I have more properties in the Page object, so I'd normally have to do something like this:

Browser("StackOverflow").Page("name:=StackOverflow", "html id:=PageID")...etc...

But I'd like to pass "name:=StackOverflow", "html id:=PageID" as a single variable, so when writing many objects I'd only have to write:

Browser(BrowserString).Page(PageString).WebEdit("name:=asdfgh")

And the first part would remain static, so if the parents' data needs to be modified I'd only have to modify two variables and not all the objects created in all libraries.

Is it possible?

If I was not clear enough please let me know.

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

I think what you're looking for is UFT's Description object

This allows you finer grained control on the description since in descriptive programming all values are regular expressions but with Description you can turn the regular expression functionality off for a specific property.

Set desc = Description.Create()
desc("html tag").Value = "A"
desc("innertext").Value = "More information..."
desc("innertext").RegularExpression = False

Browser("Example Domain").Navigate "www.example.com"
Browser("Example Domain").Page("Example Domain").WebElement(desc).Click

If you want to represent this with plain string then it's a bit more of a problem, you can write a helper function but I'm not sure I would recommend it.

Function Desc(descString)
    Set ret = Description.Create()
    values = Split(descString, "::")
    For Each value In values
        keyVal = Split(value, ":=")
        ret(keyVal(0)).Value = keyVal(1)
    Next
    Set Desc = ret
End Function

' Usage
Browser("StackOverflow").Page("StackOverflow").WebElement(Desc("html tag:=H2::innertext:=some text")).Click

Further reading about descriptive programming.