Tool Panel
Tool Panel is situated in the top left
corner of the VNCRobot window. It consists of three tabs:
- Settings, which define I/O
settings of the script in the active editor.
- Events, which displays recent RFB
events received from the server.
- Keys, which allows to send system
reserved keys to the RFB server.
Settings Tab
This tab allows to define:
- Output Path, i.e. directory where screenshots, reports and
other output files will be saved to. When you change the path, script
variable _REPORT_DIR
will be updated in the active editor. Default value is user home
directory.
- Template Path, i.e. directory which will be searched for
image comparison template images. When you change the path, script
variable _TEMPLATE_DIR
will be updated in the active editor. Default value is user home
directory.
- Create HTML report in the output path - select this option
to insert a Report
command into the active editor, deselect it to delete it. There are two
more options:
- Report File, which allows you to specify the report file
name. Note that v1.3 supports just HTML reports and the file must have
an
.html
extension. Default value is 'index.html'.
- Description, which will be displayed in the report
header. See the sample report
at VNCRobot web site.

An example displayed above will insert the following code into the
active editor:
Var _REPORT_DIR="/root/report"
Var _TEMPLATE_DIR="/root/templates"
Report "index.html" desc="This is a dummy test report."
Events Tab
Events tab displays the most recent list of events received from the
RFB (VNC) server. The event list gets reset by user actions, e.g. mouse
click, press of Enter etc. There are two types of events:
- Update events, i.e. FramebufferUpdate events defined by
the RFB protocol. These events represent update of a certain area of the
remote desktop. If you select one or more events, the areas defined by
them will display in the remote desktop as red frames. This feature may
help you to inspect how the RFB server updates the desktop screen and
tune instances of the Waitfor
update command. Each event in the list displays the update rectangle
in form of x:<x>,y:<y>,w:<width>,h:<height>,
extent of the update as a percentage of the whole window and time from
the last user action. Note that the list displays only update events
which are greater than a certain extent. This limit is by default set to
10% and can becustomized in the Preferences window.
- Bell events which indicate that the remote server beeped
(i.e. printed the Bell ASCII 0x07 character). You may take advantage of
these events to determine that execution of a CLI command finished or
succeeded/failed. See the Waitfor bell command
for more information and examples.
As an example we executed a command "ls -l
/usr/java/j2sdk1.4.2_04; echo -e '\007'
" in a terminal window on
Linux. The first event in the list represents update of the console
window caused by the directory listing. When you select this event in
the table, the updated area will display as a red frame in the remote
desktop as is visible on the picture. The second event is the bell
character printed by the echo command.

There's a small tool bar below the event table. It contains 3 buttons:
- Button
will insert a
Waitfor command into the current editor. The command will be constructed
based on selected update/bell event(s) and options defined in the
Recording Preferences.
- Button
will open the Waitfor Command Window where
you can construct a Waitfor command with custom options.
- Button
will open the Preferences window with recording options.
Keys Tab
Keys tab is aimed to help you to send such keys to the remote desktop
which are reserved by your system. A typical example is Ctrl+Alt+Del,
which is interpreted both by Windows and Linux systems as a system
command. If you want to send this key to the remote desktop without
conflict with your system, you may use the tools provided by this panel.
There are two options:
- Quick Press allows you to select a predefined key in the
drop down and send it to the remote desktop. The list is currently
limited to the most frequently used key combinations. If you want to
customize the list, modify the
recording.quickKeys
option
in your configuration file.
- Create Press allows you to create virtually any combination
of keys. To press a key select the modifiers (Alt, Ctrl, Shift,
Windows), choose a key in the drop down and press Apply. Note that the
content of the key drop down is derived from Java internal classes. See
the Key Browser help page for more info.
If recording is selected and you generate a key using this tool, a
Press command will be inserted into the active editor. If the recording
feature is off, you will be asked whether you want to insert the command
or not.
