Creating an Automatic Demonstration or Test with Redirect

Redirect is a memory-resident utility that records keystrokes while a DP4 program is running. The keystrokes are recorded in an ASCII file. Redirect can play back the file to perform the recorded actions automatically. These are the two main functions of Redirect:

• User demonstrations

  Create an automatic demonstration that shows the features of your application.

• Test scripts

  Record test scripts for validating an application. This type of validation ensures that changes to an application do not have unexpected results

You can include comments and pauses in the playback. You define the relative pause speed for each pause when recording the demonstration. However, most of the factors affecting pauses are defined within the colour and display preferences of the DP4 System Setup utility, including:

• The duration of a standard pause. (This is divided by the pause speed, a number from 1 through 9, to determine the actual duration of a pause).

• The duration of the pause increment. This is the amount by which the pause is increased or reduced, depending on whether the <+> or <−> key is pressed during the playback.

• The duration of a 'wait'. This allows you to turn a pause into a long wait by pressing the <Enter> key during the playback

These options are fully described in Changing a User's Preferences.

This section is divided into the following topics:

• Recording Demonstrations

• Playing Back Demonstrations

• Amending the Keystrokes in a Demonstration

• Interpreting the Keystrokes in a Redirect File

• Problems with Demonstrations