Handle Dynamic Identifiers

Suppose a web application generates IDs with random numbers in the format:

To instruct TestComplete to ignore these generated IDs, you can add the following wildcard pattern to the project’s Object Identification options:

Using regular expressions, the same pattern can be specified as follows:

Both patterns match identifiers that start with the x-gen- string followed by any characters.

For a more precise match —x-gen- followed only by digits rather than any characters — you can use the following regular expression:

Suppose a web application inserts auto-generated prefixes at the beginning of element IDs, for example:

We would like TestComplete to use only the meaningful part of these IDs - login and password, respectively. For this purpose, we can define a regular expression pattern that denotes the meaningful part of the ID using capturing parentheses { }:

and specify $1 as the pattern’s Stable ID Template.

Given the identifier x-gen-123-login, the capturing group will extract login, and TestComplete will use this value as the object’s ObjectIdentifier in the Object Browser and Name Mapping.

Now suppose that a web application inserts auto-generated numbers in the middle of IDs, as follows:

We would like TestComplete to identify objects by IDs without these numbers, for example, using the form-login identifier instead of form-123-login. For this purpose, we can define the regular expression pattern specified below. Once again, we use the capturing parentheses { } to denote the meaningful parts of the dynamic ID:

Then in the Stable ID Template specify $1$2.

Given the identifier form-123-login, the first capturing group extracts form and the second group extracts -login. This gives form-login as the resulting ObjectIdentifier value used in the Object Browser and Name Mapping.