Extending Controls

QualityMate offers an architecture to extend and personalize the current controls interface functionality or even create a new brand control by defining a new interface.

This feature is for high experienced users with knowledge in UI components and the QualityMate framework.

Building your extensions project using Visual studio

Set up a new project

The first step is to create a dedicate .DLL project by selecting the menu item File -> Add -> New project -> Visual C# -> Class library. Then select a name ending with the pattern .ControlExtensions and its directory.

Creating a new project for the control extension

The assembly name needs to end with .ControlExtensions and needs to have the same output folder as QualityMate. In this way, the extensions DLL will load correctly.

Creating a new control interface

To create a new control, its important to create an interface that will inherit the QualityMate interface IControl.

The following is an example of a control interface.

public interface IADODataControl : IControl
{
    // Moves to the next row of this control.
    void Next();

    // Moves to the previous row of this control.
    void Previous();
}

Implementing a new control

QualityMate uses metadata attributes to identify the implementation based on the defined CustomTechnology and control interface.

The following is an example of how to export the required information:

// Export the created interface
[Export(typeof(IMyControlInterface))] 
// Export a technology to bind.
[ControlMetadata("MyExportedTechnology")] 
public class DesktopAdoDataControl : Control, IADODataControl

• New controls should inherit from the Control class as it contains the core functionality of control interactions.

• Interface methods implementation should use Control's ExecuteInteraction method to handle implicit retries.

Loading a custom extension

To load customized controls, you need to specify the user configuration exported technology name.