Friday 15 March 2013

Packaging an O2 Platform Script as a stand alone tool (in this case the WatiN based ‘IE Script’ tool)

If you grab the latest version of the O2 Platform and try to run the IE Script tool

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you might get a bunch of compilation errors, like the ones Arnaud described in this How to get a "full" version of o2  mailing list thread.

The best way to deal with this is to run this O2 Script as a ‘packaged script’, i.e. from a stand-alone exe that contains all dependencies required to run it.

The rest of this post shows how to create such stand-alone exe for the IE Script tool.

Open the Package O2 Script tool/script

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which looks like this:

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Then click on Find an O2 Script:

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Search for IE Automation

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And Drag-n-drop the IE Automation (Simple mode).h2  into the Drop Zone

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The button should go green to represent an active build/package process

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And look like this when completed (the button goes red if there are compilation or packaging errors)

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That 3.084kb exe file is now our packaged script :)

You can run this executable directly from here:

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or copy it to another vm with .NET 4.0 installed

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and run it from there:

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In some cases (like this one), there will be two new folders created in the executable folder.

The O2.Platform.Scripts (containing the scripts dynamically compiled by the REPL)

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And the O2.Temp (which will contain all temp files (including the O2 assemblies that were embedded in the stand-alone exe and extracted to facilitate the compilation))

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Going back into the tool that created the stand alone script, the logs provide really good info on what happened:

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and if you open the _BuildFiles you can see the VisualStudio project that was programmatically created and compiled

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In fact, you can open that IE Automation (Simple mode).csproj file in VisualStudio

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And run the tool (or a customized version of it) from there:

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Note: I just uploaded the IE Automation (Simple mode) v1.0.exe tool to the O2 Platform downloads at Google Code, so you can also grab it from there:

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