USER MANUALS

Steps for Generating a Navigation Sequence

This section provides a step-by-step description of how a navigation sequence is normally generated (section Component Configuration provides an example).

  1. Click on the Rec button to enter the record mode.

  2. A dialog box appears requesting the initial URL of the sequence. This can either be written directly or pasted from the clipboard (Paste option in the contextual menu). For example, the Denodo example Webmail application can be used (see section Presentation of the Example).

  3. The browser automatically loads the initial page of the sequence. The red light lights up until loading is complete.

  4. Once the traffic lights change to green, the navigation sequence can be generated. For this, the browser should be used to generate the required sequence, simply remembering the following two points:

    • At each page change during sequence generation you have to wait for the green light to turn on before continuing.

    • To specify browsing actions, use either of the two methods explained in section Description of the Navigation Sequences Generator Interface: the contextual menu that appears right-clicking the mouse or the Fire Actions image0 menu. Events generated using the keyboard or directly on the page without using the events mentioned above, will not be registered by the Generator.

    In our WebMail example, the system could be used to generate a sequence that automatically accesses the content of a user’s Inbox folder and sorts the messages by date. To do this, you should enter the user identification (e.g. demos) and password (e.g. DeMo.04), by using the “Set Text” event on each field. Changing the language selection, if required, is also possible (with the “Select Option” event). After pressing the form submission button (“Click” event), once the traffic lights icon turns green click the ‘Date’ link (“Click” event) to sort the messages by date.

  5. At any point during the generation of the sequence, the Play button can be used to reproduce the portion of the sequence generated up to that moment. The system will launch a browser window in which the automatic execution of the generated sequence can be viewed. A dialog box will also display the execution trace of the NSEQL commands.

    Note

    Some Web sites use cookie-based session authentication and maintenance techniques that can cause immediate reproduction of the sequence not to work, even though the sequence is being generated correctly. See section Checking Navigation Sequences in Systems with Cookie-Based Session Authentication and Maintenance for more information.

  6. Once the desired sequence has been completed, the NSEQL command program generated can be saved to disk by pressing the Save button and selecting the folder and file name as required. Such file will contain the sequence of NSEQL commands corresponding to the generated navigation sequence in text format.

  7. Once the sequence has ended, the Stop button should be pressed to exit the record mode and return to the start mode (this can be done before or after saving the sequence on disk).

  8. The sequence can be executed at any time by clicking Open and selecting the file in which it was saved. It is important to take into account that if the navigation sequence contains any variable, the execution will not be satisfactory, since it will not perform the variable substitution.

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