I have spent the last weeks testing the new AutoCAD version, 2009. One of the greatest new feature for me it the Action Recorder which realize one of the top requests of all times.
This tools, on its first release, is capable of recording your actions and commands inside AutoCAD and then generate some kind of rich script as the below picture:
I think this tool will help a lot our daily testing procedures once it allow us to create several scripts easily. The major advantage in this case is the strict interaction with AutoCAD native commands and their features.
One negative point is regarding dialogs. In this case you cannot automate the dialog interaction. This is not good once the dialog interaction may be more than 50% of your testing procedure. When the action recorder finds a dialog it stops for the user interaction and then resumes.
The Action Recorder tool is very interesting and I'm sure it will evolve a lot on the next versions and maybe we will see some dialog interaction and a part of its features.
We can think on building some test procedure now with a mix of Action Recorder and other automation tool. I think one will complete each other as the testing tools have the dialog automation well resolved and the Action Recorder has AutoCAD specific features well resolved too.
Cheers!
