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Rational® Functional Tester
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.
Troubleshooting in the Functional Test perspective
In this section, you will learn how to troubleshoot the tests in the Functional Test perspective.
Viewing trace files within Rational® Functional Tester
You can view Rational® Functional Tester trace files in the Rational Functional Tester integrated development environment (IDE) Error Log view.

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.
  - Troubleshooting in the UI Test perspective
    You can find information about the issues or problems that you might encounter while working with Rational® Functional Tester in the UI Test perspective. Details about issues, their causes and the resolutions that you can apply to fix the issues are described in this section.
  - Troubleshooting in the Functional Test perspective
    In this section, you will learn how to troubleshoot the tests in the Functional Test perspective.
    - Troubleshooting functional tests in Mozilla Firefox browsers
      If you encounter problems while testing in Mozilla Firefox browsers, the following workarounds might help resolve them.
    - Unable to test eclipse-based applications
      Generally the applications that are enabled for functional testing is in the enabled state after you upgrade Rational® Functional Tester. If you find any issues while testing the applications, disable the Eclipse application and enable it again for functional testing.
    - Ambiguous object recognition in functional testing
      Ambiguous recognition occurs when Rational® Functional Tester can not uniquely identify an object in the system-under-test. This commonly happens when Rational Functional Tester cannot differentiate between an instance of the application-under-test started by a script playback and an instance of the same application inadvertently left open previous to script playback. This also applies to identical windows from one application and identical HTML documents. Ambiguous recognition will cause script playback failure unless the duplicate application is closed.
    - Screen snapshot on playback failure of functional tests
      If playback of a script causes an exception to be thrown, Rational® Functional Tester takes a screen snapshot at the time of the failure. The screen snapshot is accessible through the log.
    - Tips and tricks for functional testing HTML applications
      This topic provides tips and tricks for recording and playing back scripts to test HTML applications.
    - Java applets in HTML pages
      You can test Java™ applets within a browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer). Java applets are not mapped as nested within HTML but are recorded as top-level objects. In the test object map, applets appear at the top level.
    - Standard properties available for functional testing HTML objects
      Standard properties provide a common way to access properties and their values across browsers. This topic lists the standard properties available for HTML objects.
    - Uninstalling Rational® Functional Tester cleanly
      If you have any issues during uninstall and reinstall of Rational® Functional Tester, you can perform a few tasks to verify whether the required processes are stopped and all the files are deleted from the computer.
    - Problems with object recognition
      If you encounter a problem with object recognition during testing, you might be able to resolve the problem by following these instructions.
    - Unable to create a verification point by using the vpDynamic action
      When you run a functional test for the first time to create a verification point by using the vpDynamic("vpName").performTest() action in the test script, the test step fails.
    - Troubleshooting issues in SAP tests
      You can find information about the issues or problems that you might encounter while you test the SAP GUI. Details about issues, their causes and the resolutions that you can apply to fix the issues are described in the following table.
    - Problems with environment enablement
      When it is not possible to record on the application-under-test, you must verify whether the test environment was enabled for functional testing.
    - Handling exceptions
      If an exception occurs during testing, you might be able to handle it by following these instructions. Two common exceptions are the ambiguous recognition exception and the Mutex timeout exception during playback.
    - Collecting Rational® Functional Tester error logs
      While working with Rational® Functional Tester, you might encounter some problems that you can easily troubleshoot. If you are unable to troubleshoot the problem, you can contact IBM Software Support. Gather all the required background information such as logs, crash dumps, and traces and provide them to the IBM Software Support for investigation. In addition to the background information, you must also generate the error logs and provide those files to the support team.
    - Viewing trace files within Rational® Functional Tester
      You can view Rational® Functional Tester trace files in the Rational Functional Tester integrated development environment (IDE) Error Log view.
    - Frequently asked questions
      This section provides answers to frequently asked questions about IBM® Rational® Functional Tester.
    - Rational® Functional Tester error messages
      This section provides information about error messages that you might encounter with Rational® Functional Tester. This section lists the error messages by ID, explanation, system action and your response to correct the error message.
- Reference Guide
  This guide describes the additional topics to gain more knowledge about 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.

Viewing trace files within Rational® Functional Tester

You can view Rational® Functional Tester trace files in the Rational® Functional Tester integrated development environment (IDE) Error Log view.

Before you begin

Complete these steps:

Set the preferences for trace files in the Logging and Tracing page. Click Window > Preferences, expand Functional Test in the left pane, and then click Logging and Tracing.
Enable the generation of trace files by selecting the Enable Tracing check box
Enable the generation of trace files in the Eclipse error log format (.log) by selecting the Generate traces in Eclipse error log format check box.
Specify other details for the trace files, such as the level of detail, allowable file size, number of files to be retained, and the location where the trace files should be stored, and save your settings.

About this task

Rational® Functional Tester trace files contain debug information which you can use to troubleshoot problems you encounter. You can configure Rational® Functional Tester to generate trace files in the .txt format, or the Eclipse error log (.log) format. Only trace files generated in the .log format can be imported into the Eclipse Error Log view within Rational® Functional Tester. After importing the .log trace file into the Error Log view, you can work with the data using Eclipse log filtering operations.

Procedure

In Rational® Functional Tester, click Window > Show View, and then click Other.
In the Show View dialog box, expand General, and click Error Log.
The Error Log view is displayed as a tab in Rational® Functional Tester.
In the Error Log view, click the Import Log icon.
Navigate to the directory where the trace files are stored, and select the trace file (rft_trace.log) to import.
The trace file details are shown in the Error Log view.
You can use the Eclipse filter operations to work with the trace data. Right-click a trace data item to open the Log Filters dialog box. You can filter event types, limit the number of visible items in the log, filter events from the most recent session, and enable filters to hide stack trace elements.