CCF: Listening to External Application Events

It is often necessary to listen to external application UI events when automating applications in CCF. For example, we may need to save a value in the Context if the user presses a button, or do something when an alert dialog appears. There are many ways we can handle events. In CCF 2008, the Hosted Application Toolkit (HAT) provides an easy way to listen to them. If not using HAT we can hook to events using the UIAutomation or MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility) APIs within our own application adapters....

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CCF HAT - Making use of DDAs from Legacy Adapters

Although Data Driven Adapters (DDAs) are mainly designed for Automation Adapters in HAT, we can make use of them from legacy adapters, too. Here's an example of an external VB application, which is configured to use a legacy application adapter and a WinDataDrivenAdapter with the corresponding bindings:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding...

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CCF 2008 Hosted Application Toolkit

The Hosted Application Toolkit (HAT) is a new component of CCF 2.6 (2008) that facilitates the task of automating the UI of the hosted applications. It consists of two main parts: the Data Driven Adapters (DDA) and the Automations (WF workflows) that automates the hosted application using the DDAs.

Data Driven Adapters

DDAs must inherit from DataDrivenAdapterBase in Microsoft.Ccf.HostedApplicationToolkit. CCF supports two implementations out of the box: WinDataDrivenAdapter and WebDataDrivenAdapter. We can inherit from any of the three to extend the DDA as necessary. The methods the DDAs expose to manipulate the hosted application UI are ExecuteControlAction, FindControl, GetControlValue and SetControlValue. These methods take a friendly name as parameter and lets the application adapters interact with the hosted application UI abstracting from the details of how to obtain the control from that friendly name. The mapping between the controls' friendly names and the directions for the DDA to finding them is called Data Driven Adapter Binding and is part of the hosted app initialization string:...

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CCF 2008 New Features

The 3.0 version of the Customer Care Framework (CCF) is out! Among its new features we'll find:

• CCF web services migrated to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
• Agent Desktop use of Composite Application Block (CAB).
• Hosted Application Toolkit (HAT): new sub-system for providing UI automation, that makes use of Workflow Foundation (WF) and Active Accessibility.
• ClickOnce support.
• Dynamic Applications: 3rd category of hosted applications that allow an agent to dynamically launch or close a hosted application on-demand, via the UI or programmatically in code. ...

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