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?

Solution 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.

Solution 2

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.

Solution 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.

Solution 4

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.

Solution 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.

View more solutions