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Rational® Functional Tester
Reference Guide
This guide describes the additional topics to gain more knowledge about Rational® Functional Tester.
Reference information for the Functional Test perspective
In this section, you will learn all the reference or additional information about the Functional Test perspective.
Test application domain support
Rational® Functional Tester is an object-oriented automated testing tool that tests Windows®, .NET, Java™, HTML, SAP, AJAX, PowerBuilder, Flex, Dojo, Visual Basic and GEF applications.
HTML support
IBM® Rational® Functional Tester supports testing HTML applications that are loaded in a browser.

Rational® Functional Tester
- Release Notes
  This document contains information about what's new, installation instructions, known problems in and contact information of IBM Customer Support.
- System Requirements
  This document includes information about hardware and software requirements for IBM® Rational® Functional Tester.
- Getting Started Guide
  This guide provides an overview of Rational® Functional Tester. You can find the task flows to get you started with Rational Functional Tester. This guide is intended for new users.
- Tutorials
  You can learn to start using Rational® Functional Tester by reviewing the information in the Tutorials for the UI Test perspective and Functional Test perspective.
- Samples
  You can find the sample project that you can use with Rational® Functional Tester to test the functionality of an application.
- Administrator Guide
  This guide describes how to install IBM® Rational® Functional Tester software. After you install the software, you can perform administration tasks such as license configuration and integration with other products. This guide is intended for administrators.
- Test Author Guide
  This guide describes how to create test scripts and enhances them by applying different test elements such as dataset, variables, and verification points.
- Test Execution Specialist Guide
  This guide describes how to automate the playback of the tests by using different methods such as Docker, IBM Cloud Private, Jenkins and so on. The test results can be pushed to Rational® Test Control Panel.
- Test Manager Guide
  This guide describes how to keep track of the performance of the application by evaluating the test results. Following topics cover how you can work with the test results.
- Troubleshooting
  This guide describes how to analyze and resolve some of the common problems that you might encounter while you work with Rational® Functional Tester.
- Reference Guide
  This guide describes the additional topics to gain more knowledge about Rational® Functional Tester.
  - Reference information for the UI Test perspective
    In this section, you will learn all the reference or additional information about the Web UI Test perspective.
  - Reference information for the Functional Test perspective
    In this section, you will learn all the reference or additional information about the Functional Test perspective.
    - Test application domain support
      Rational® Functional Tester is an object-oriented automated testing tool that tests Windows®, .NET, Java™, HTML, SAP, AJAX, PowerBuilder, Flex, Dojo, Visual Basic and GEF applications.
      - Adobe PDF documents support
        IBM® Rational® Functional Tester supports testing of Portable Document Format (PDF) read-only files created for Adobe Reader versions 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, and 11.0. (Adobe Reader 11 is the last supported version of the Reader application.) You can test PDF files that are displayed in a browser or in the stand-alone Adobe Reader application. A functional test script that is recorded for files that are displayed in the stand-alone Adobe Reader application can be played back when the file is displayed in a browser and vice-versa, provided that the script is recorded for document controls only. Support for Adobe PDF requires Visual C++ 2013 or higher.
      - AJAX support
        Rational® Functional Tester supports testing AJAX-based web applications.
      - Application Response Measurement support
        The Application Response Measurement (ARM) standard helps measure the end-to-end transaction performance of an application, including service levels and response time. Rational® Functional Tester uses the response time breakdown to view the statistics that is captured while running a test.
      - Dojo support
        IBM® Rational® Functional Tester supports testing HTML applications that contain Dojo controls on versions of all browsers supported by Rational Functional Tester. You can test applications that are developed using Dojo Toolkit versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3.2, 1.4.2, 1.5, 1.6.1, 1.7, 1.8, and 1.9.
      - Eclipse support
        Rational® Functional Tester supports testing of applications based on Eclipse 3.0.x, 3.1.x, 3.2.x, 3.3.x, 3.4.x, 3.5.x, 3.6.2, 4.2, 4.2.2, and 4.4.
      - Flex support
        IBM® Rational® Functional Tester supports testing functional aspects of Adobe® Flex applications. You can record and playback scripts against Flex-based user interfaces inside a web browser and verify that the application functions correctly.
      - GEF support
        Rational® Functional Tester allows testing the functionality of GEF objects that are implemented using standard GEF editors and non-standard GEF editors. GEF editor is based on Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) that provides many features for manipulating models. GEF displays a model graphically, employs MVC (model-view-controller) architecture and aids user interaction with that model.
      - HTML support
        IBM® Rational® Functional Tester supports testing HTML applications that are loaded in a browser.
      - Java support
        This functional testing application supports the following Java™ versions for testing Java applications and HTML applications with applets.
      - .NET support
        IBM® Rational® Functional Tester supports recording and playing back user applications that are built with the Microsoft .NET Framework. You can also test Microsoft Windows 32-bit applications that contain .NET controls.
      - Windows support
        Rational® Functional Tester supports testing of Windows applications with Win32 controls.
      - Nested domains support
        Rational® Functional Tester recognizes two different kinds of nesting of objects, a parent-child nesting and an owner-owned nesting. A parent-child nesting occurs when one object is contained within another, such as a button on a form. An owner-owned nesting occurs when the owned object has its own top-level window, such as a dialog box that is owned by a top-level window.
      - PowerBuilder support
        IBM® Rational® Functional Tester supports the testing of Win32 targets and .NET targets that are created by using Sybase PowerBuilder versions 10.5, 11.0, 11.2, 11.5, 12.0, 12.5, 12.6, and Appeon PowerBuilder 2017.
      - SAP support
        IBM® Rational® Functional Tester supports extended functional testing of SAP GUI for Windows and SAP GUI for HTML.
      - Visual Basic support
        Rational® Functional Tester supports testing Visual Basic 5.0 and 6.0 applications.
      - Terminal-based applications support
        Rational® Functional Tester Extension for Terminal-based Applications supports functional testing of Mainframe or zSeries (TN3270, TN3270E), AS/400 or iSeries (TN5250) and pSeries or Virtual Terminals (VT default, VT100, VT101, VT102, VT220-7, VT220-8, VT320, VT420-7, VT420-8, VT52, VT UTF-8).
    - Command line interface
      In this section, you will learn about the actions that can also be performed from the command line.
    - UI reference
      In this section, you will learn all the UI references and its additional information for the Functional Test perspective.
  - Reference information for the Visual Studio IDE
  - Java API reference
    You can find the links to view the following API reference guides of IBM® Rational® Functional Tester:
- All Guides (PDF)
  You can find the link to view or download the content of the release notes, system requirements, and persona guides of IBM® Rational® Functional Tester as a PDF file.
- Security Considerations
  You can take certain actions to ensure that your installation is secure, customize your security settings, and set up user access controls.
- Notices
  This document provides information about copyright, trademarks, terms and conditions for the product documentation.

HTML support

IBM® Rational® Functional Tester supports testing HTML applications that are loaded in a browser.

The Functional Test perspective can be used to test HTML4 applications and the UI Test perspective can be used to test web applications built with HTML4 and HTML5 technologies. For information on testing of HTML5-based applications, refer to Testing web applications.

Rational® Functional Tester supports the following options to test HTML applications:

Recording tests for HTML applications using the different browser settings. See Web UI recording.
Using a specific browser profile for test runs. See Setting a specific browser profile for the playback.
Clearing the data stored in browsers before test runs. See Clearing cache, cookies, and history of browsers.
Running tests in headless and private mode. See Running tests in the headless mode and Running tests in the private or incognito mode.
Updating tests with guided healing and self-healing. See Overview of guided healing and self-healing.
Multi-window support to test Functional HTML tests. See Multiwindow support for functional HTML tests.

Rational® Functional Tester supports testing HTML applications that are loaded in the following browsers:

Google Chrome: See Preparing for functional testing in the Google Chrome browser.
Microsoft® Edge: See Running a script from the Microsoft Edge browser.
Internet Explorer
Mozilla Firefox: See Enabling Mozilla Firefox for Web UI testing and Recording a Web UI test in Mozilla Firefox.

When you record a script, Rational® Functional Tester creates a test object map for the application under test. The test object map contains descriptions of all test objects to which the script refers. The test object maps that Rational® Functional Tester creates for HTML applications are often more hierarchical than those created for Java™ applications. The highest level of the test object map is a browser and the HTML application is inside the browser. For more information, see the example of a test object map that is created for a HTML application.