reAJAX - FBK | SE - Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Step 1b Selection of the GUI-events that must be monitorized since they can change the state
of the selected mutator elements in the pa
Section of the events in the GUI of the target application that can have some impact in the state of
the inspector elements selected in the previous steps. Those events are called mutator elements for
the target application. The selection of these elements is performed at the same time, by means of
the same DOM-viewer and in the same way in which the inspector elements are selected. The
difference is that when selecting a mutator element, the user is asked to click on the mouse three
times in the selected element (i.e., one click to define the current element as an inspector; two clicks
to define it as inspector and mutator, at the same time; and three clicks to select it as mutator).
Step 2 For each inspector, definition of its abstraction function (ABS) that will be used by
reAJAX to record the value reached at runtime by each inspector;
When selected inspector and mutator elements, the next step consists in identifying the correct
abstraction function for each selected inspector. Notice that at least one inspector and one mutator
must be selected otherwise reAJAX does not allow the user to define the abstraction function and so
trace application executions. If the user starts the ABS definition by means of the related reAJAX
menu, for each selected inspector, reAJAX shows a popup with two different areas:
- left: it contains the list of the inspectors selected for which an abstraction must be
defined. Notice that a checkbox is used by reAJAX to show whether the abstraction
function for a given inspector element has been defined;
- right: it contains several different types of abstraction functions (see below) provided by
reAJAX and that can be customized by the user (note that this list of abstraction
functions can be obtained by means of a double-click on one of the inspectors shown in
the left side of this popup).
Currently, reAJAX provides the following set of functions:
NotNull: an element of a page exists at a given time (e.g., items of a list can
be added at runtime);
NotEmpty: an element is not empty at a given time (e.g., consider the text value of an
element );
Constant-value: strings and numbers in a textual field can assume a specific value or a
range of specific values (e.g., a number can be greater or less than a constant).
NumChildBool: true when an element contains a number (greater than 0) of other
embedded elements (children in the DOM) of a specific type (e.g., a contains
one or more rows);
NumChildAbsolute: an element contains a given number of embedded elements of a
specific type (e.g., a contains zero/one/two/etc. rows);
RegularExpressionRules: the value of an element (e.g., its content or text) matches a
regular expression. reAJAX allows to define an ordered set of pairs ``regular expression -
abstract state value'' for each element of a page. If the value of an element matches one of
the defined regular expressions its corresponding state-value is used to represent the
current state of the element (e.g., the text into a can be composed only by
lowercase letters ``[a-z]*'').
For each type of inspector (i.e., HTML element) that can compose a Web page, a predefined
abstraction is pre-configured by reAJAX. In this default configuration, the abstraction function can
be used by the user without any additional effort. In the following we summarize the most frequent
element types and their default abstraction provided by reAJAX: