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Provide tooling to work with 3rd party libraries where the components are not named

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#256 1 comment 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
java
Domain
desktop, testing

Research direction

Start by reviewing pull request #255, which the issue identifies as the proposed entry point for component naming. Check how field-derived names, generated names, overwriting, and generated-only mode are handled, and consider the examples in this issue as the completion criteria.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I work a lot with 3rd party software where the UI has not been well designed and components generally do not have a 'name' attribute set, and that makes the matching code quite verbose, or sometimes impossible and I have to resort to reflection to access the components.

I've raised a PR https://github.com/assertj/assertj-swing/pull/255 which addresses this by providing a mechanism to set the name of components. It works as follows:

Use the field name where possible. e.g.

private JTextField myText; // Set the name to be 'myText'

For anonymous fields, use a unique generated name. e.g.

public void createComponents(){
  add(new JTextField()); // Set the name to be 'JTextField-1'
  add(new JTextField()); // Set the name to be 'JTextField-2'
}

Optionally allow overwriting the names of fields. This is useful where the components have been given unsuitable or identical names.

public void createComponentsBadly(){
  textField1.setName("text1");
  ...
  textField2.setName("text1");
}

Optionally allow only using generated names. This is useful when the code has been obfuscated and the field names do not provide any meaning, or when the field names are confusing

private JTextField a; // Set the name to be 'JTextField-1'
private JTextField b; // Set the name to be 'JTextField-2'
private JTextField combo1; // Set the name to be 'JTextField-3'
Dominant language
Java
Stars
121
Forks
52
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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