Latest Posts

Export Test Cases From Quality Center Using Python

Here is a Python script that will export out test cases in a folder from Quality Center into a CSV file.

The following script will not handle Attachments. Will work on that later when I have time.

Building a Twitter Filter With CherryPy, Redis, and tweetstream

Background

questions.com is currently down. My slicehost VPS has been blacklisted by Twitter because I misread the documentation for tweetstream

all the code is available at https://github.com/bulkan/queshuns

Since reading this post by Simon Willison I've been interested in Redis and have been following its development. After having a quick play around with Redis I've been looking for a project to work on that uses Redis as a data store. I then came across this blog post by Mirko Froehlich, in which he shows the steps and code to create a Twitter filter using Redis as the datastore and Sinatra as the web app. This blog post will explain how I created queshuns.com in Python and the various listed tools below.

Tools

tweetstream - provides the interface to the Twitter Streaming API
CherryPy - used for handling the web app side, no need for an ORM
Jinja2 - HTML templating
jQuery - for doing the AJAXy stuff and visual effects
redis-py - Python client for Redis
Redis - the "database", look here for the documenation on how to install it

Retrieving tweets

The first thing we need to is retrieve tweets from the Twitter Streaming API. Thankfully there is already a Python module that provides a nice interface called tweetstream. For more information about tweetstream look at the Cheeseshop page for its usage guide.

Here is the code for the filter_daemon.py, which when executed as a script from the command-line will start streaming tweets from Twitter that contain the words "why", "how", "when", "lol", "feeling" and the tweet must end in a question mark.

In this script I define a class, FilterRedis which I use to abstract some methods that will be used by both filter_daemon.py and later by the web app itself.

The important part of this class is the push method, which will push data onto the tail of a Redis list. It also keeps a count of items and when it goes over the threshold of 100 items, it will trim starting from the head and the first 20th elements (or the oldest tweets).

The schema for the tweet data that gets pushed into the Redis list is a dictionary of values that gets jsonified (we can probably use then new Redis hash type);

{ 'id':"the tweet id", 'text':"text of the tweet", 'username':", 'userid':"userid", 'name': "name of the twitter user", 'profile_image_url': "url to profile image", 'received_at':time.time() }

'received_at' is important because we will be using that to find new tweets to display in the web app.

Web App

I picked CherryPy to write the web application, because I wanted to learn it for the future when I need to write a small web frontends that dont need an ORM. Also, CherryPy has a built-in HTTP server that is sufficient for websites with small loads, which I initially used to run queshuns.com it is now being run with mod_python. For templating, I used Jinja2 because its similair in syntax to the Django templating language that I am familiar with.

The following is the code for questions_app.py which is the CherryPy application.

The index (method) of the web app will get the all the tweets from Redis. The other exposed
function is latest which accepts an argument since which is used to get tweets that are newer (since is the latest tweets received_at value). nt is used to create a different URL each time so that IE doesn't cache it. This method returns JSON at.

The templates are located in a directory called templates :)

Here is the template for the root/index of the site; index.jinja

This template will be used to render a list of tweets and also assign the first tweets recieved_at value to a variable on the window object. This is used by the refreshTweets function which will pass it on to /latest in a GET parameter. refreshTweets will try to get new tweets and prepend it to the content div and then slide the latest tweets. This is the template used to render the HTML for the latest tweets;

I explicitly set the the latest div to "display: none" so that I can animate it.

Now we should be able to run questions_daemon.py to start retrieving tweets then start questions_app.py to look at the web app. On your browser go to http://localhost:8080/ and if everything went correctly you should see a list of tweets that update every 10 seconds.

Thats it. Hope this was helpful.

Baş Taksım - Bulkan Evcimen - (736 Şeb-i Arus - Avusturalya)

jQuery.get and IE7

I've been recently playing around with jQuery and some AJAXy stuff using jquery.get to request a piece of HTML. Like any sane web developer I use Firefox and Firebug and everything worked as expected. But then I decided to try Internet Explorer 7 (yeah i'm crazy like that). Well the AJAX call didn't work. Actuallyjquery.get was executed but the callback function didn't get ehh called. I spent quite a few hours googling I didn't find anything directly to solve my problem.
This Google Group post kind of helped.

I read on the jQuery docs that the callback to get will only execute if data is loaded. Don't know why data wasn't being loaded when IE7 issued the get (maybe because of caching ). So I decided to change the back end code to return JSON instead and use jquery.getJSON. With this change IE7 getJSON successfully got data back from the server.

Install Shield Silent Installs

Install Shield has this nifty feature of being able to install packages in silent mode. This means that you can run setup.exe from the command prompt and it will install in the background with no user interaction. This is very useful if you want to test your installation. If you use some sort of continuous integration system (and you should if you don't) then you could download the latest installer do a silent install and run some tests against the program that is installed, then silent uninstall it all automat(g)ically.

To be able to do silent installs/un-installs you first need to record a response file that contains all the choices for the install shield dialogs.

To record the response file;

setup.exe -r

This will be like a normal install done manually. Follow it through like you would in any normal installation. After the installer exits, the response file should be at C:\Windows\setup.iss

Next time around you can do a silent install by running

setup.exe -s -f1

I'm paranoid so I use the absolute path to the response file. There is no space between "-f1" and the path to setup.iss. Note that, when you run the above command to silent install, the command will seem to exit immediately but if you check Task Manager you should see setup.exe (possibly 2 of them) running.

Silent un-installation is pretty much the same. You need to create a response file first. To do this run the following;

setup.exe -r -uninst -removeonly

This will again create a setup.iss file in C:\Windows I usually rename the uninstall response file as uninst.iss. Now you can do silent uninstallation by running;

setup.exe -s -uninst -removeonly -f1

Some installers might install the program under different GUID's each time you install it. If this is the case I have found that the above command for uninstallation doesn't work, as Install Shield doesn't know what to uninstall. The solution is to work out the UninstallString from the Registry (which is what Windows uses to uninstall the program via Add/Remove Software).

Here is a python script that uses the registry module (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/registry/) to find out the full UninstallString. You first need to manually find this string in your registry by looking under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall so that you can pass into this function a unique string that is present in the UninstallString of your program

EDIT: the following script is quite ugly actually. I have a new version in which I use regobj it makes things easier.

Hicaz Peşrev (Salim Bey), Son Yürük Semai ve Taksim

Running QTP tests using Python

QTP provides an interface called the automation object model. This model is essentially a COM interface providing a bunch of objects that can be used to automate QTP. The full object list is available in the QuickTest Professional Automation documentation.

Running QTP tests from the command line is useful for doing scheduled automatic testing. If you use a continuous integration system to do automatic builds of your software, you can run your QTP tests on the latest build.

The following is a Python script that is able to run a test and print out Passed or Failed. It is a direct port of example code in the documentation written in VBScript

Hicaz Taksim

Evcara Saz Semai - Dilhayat Kalfa

Aşk-Efza Saz Eseri - Sadettin Arel