Can we automate Application available under Citrix Program Neighbourhood?

Question

I tried to automate an application available under Citrixl Program Neightbourhood using QTP 9.5, but QTP does not identify the objects inside the application. Can we automate citrix application using QTP?

What are different tools available to perform automation testing on Citrix applications?

Marijo

Have you installed QTP on the Citrix machine or on your local machine? – Clevey

The QTP and Citrix are not on the same machine. The machine with QTP has 'Citrix Program Neighbourhood' (client) installed on it. I am invoking this thru QTP to access my application available within Citrix. – Marijo

LoadRunner does it, though it is not an FT tool, for sure. – Forestay

Answer 1

I have used Scapa Technologies for Citrix ICA or Terminal Services testing. Scapa provides an automation tool that is installed on the Citrix server. Then it has a controller that launches the citrix session, communicates with the server and starts the automation tool which calls your automation script. It actually runs on the server so it can interact with the applications controls.

Stilla

Answer 2

The difficulty with Citrix automation is that the applications are streamlined to the client computer as an image, thus you can not access to the UI tree of elements.

UiPath can automate very easy Citrix applications (also desktop or web) by using some image automation specific techniques like

• clicking relative to an image
• using OCR for text scraping
• using keyboard hotkeys
• click relative to a OCRed text

Here's a full tutorial showing different Citrix (or virtual desktops) automation techniques for

• data entry
• OCR data scraping
• clicking and typing relative to an image or text

UiPath has an SDK that can be used from code. The default will be to create visual automation (workflows) directly from UiPath Studio.

Note: I work at UiPath. You should also try other visual automation tools like Automation Anywhere, WinAutomation, QTP, Selenium, etc, use them side by side and choose the one that suits better your needs.

Breadthways

Answer 3

Traditional tools generally do not work with applications running in remote desktop applications. The interfaces needed aren't available. Probably your only option is an image-based tool like Eggplant.

Wink

Answer 4

QTP supports Citrix only if it is installed on the Citrix machine, it doesn't support working via the client.

For technical reasons this is because QTP needs to be able to listen to windows messages and load its DLL's into some applications which it cannot do from a different machine.

Clevey

Answer 5

For what it's worth, I have automated a CITRIX application just as you described for a large telecommunications firm in the early 2000s. I did this by getting deep inside the Windows SendMessage APIs and an optical character recognition package. You would probably be astonished by how much data was moved from one system into another using my team's CITRIX/screen-scraping "robots." I came upon this question because I was reminiscing about this project and wondering if there was still a need for this type of solution in this day and age.

Intercrop

would you care to share what you did or how you went about it and what were the results ?\ – Daves

Answer 6

As per my experience this type of setup can be best handled using the Image recognition and/or OCR capable testing tools like eggplant but its not really suggested to have testing environment which includes Citrix. Another option could be to install an automation tool like AutoIT within the Citrix machine and trigger the scripts using the other tool (maybe Selenium but I am yet to try that out).

Somatic

Answer 7

Via citrix QTP object recognition is totaaly different. QTP on remote machines works on objects based on location and reference so it is almost impossible to automate.

Collettecolletti

Answer 8

As Motti said You can't automate via Citrix client. In general Citrix client is hard to automate. I know that someone at my work played with it and he managed to catch some communication and objects that could be useful to automate tests via Citrix, but that would be separate development project to create such solution that could be very limited.

Soupy