How to test Win application with RFT on Windows?

IBM Rational Functional Tester V6 and later supports the testing of Win32 and .NET windows and applications. However, these environments are not enabled for testing in the traditional means as seen for Java and other environments. These environments require what Rational calls 'dynamic enabling'.


We use the class DynamicEnabler to enable these applications dynamically. This class uses external resource file 'WindowsClassMap.dat' to indicate which classes running on the system are to be enabled. By default, we don't put any classes in that file as the dynamical enabling may waste some time if user doesn't need to test Win32 and .NET windows and applications.

The file 'WindowsClassMap.dat' is under folder c:\SAFS\lib, it contains pairs of (name, class-name), such as below:

DialogWin        :#32770
Excel               :XLMAIN
Notepad          :Notepad.*
TextPad           :TextPad.*

The name can be anything as user wants.
The class-name should be the application's top window's class-name, it can be got by "RFT Inspector", please refer to Inspect Win or .Net application by RFT. Below is a snapshot showing how we get the Notepad top window's classname

The class-name can be exact or can be wild-card by .*

If we put the pair (Notepad :Notepad.*) into file c:\SAFS\lib\WindowsClassMap.dat, we should be able to test the Notepad-application with RFT.