Event Core

This component is at the very core of AutoQUEST and provides the handling of events. The component provides a class Event which is to be used by all other AutoQUEST components when they work with events. The Event class is an aggregation of an IEventType and an IEventTarget. The interface IEventType defines the type of the event, i.e., what an event does and the interface IEventTarget defines the target of the event, i.e., where the event is sent to. Through instantiations of these classes, concrete event types and event targets are defined. The IEventTarget instantiation implicitly defines to which platform an event belongs.

Since GUIs (both on desktops and in the form of websites) are one of the main targets of quality assurance tools for event-driven software, the Event Core component also defines generalizations of the IEventType and IEventTarget interfaces that build the foundation to describe events of GUI applications.

For the event types, AutoQUEST defines the basic interactions with users through common Human-Computer-Interfaces, i.e., for mouse and keyboard interactions. All of the interactions implement the common interface IInteraction. If additional GUI interactions are implemented as AutoQUEST plug-ins, they should also implement the IInteraction interface. Furthermore, the event core provides a couple of tools to enhance sequences of these GUI events.

The Event Core provides interfaces for common GUI elements, e.g., buttons (IButton). All of the common GUI elements have the same ancestor, the IGUIElement interface. Furthermore, the Event Core contains a GUIModel class. This class is used to manage and maintain the structure of known GUI elements internally. It requires that all GUI element implementation (including those located in the AutoQUEST Plug-ins components) implement the IGUIElement interface.