This is my first time automating activities for a terminal emulator, my first though is doing it using hot keys. This is of course not the best approach and wanted to know what is the best approach since I now know that there are terminal activities. I am afraid that the terminal that I want to automate will not fall into the predefined terminals in studio since it is a very old legacy terminal called MOCAS.
1 What is the second best approach to automate terminals ?
2. how do I know if MOCAS is a candidate for predefined terminal activities?
You can absolutely automate a terminal emulator without using the Terminal Activities.
Use Type Into to send keys, and Get Full Text to read the entire “page”.
If you do go that way, ensure that you have verification for every step you take in your automation, if you input something, read the result and verify that you’ve affected your application.
Here’s also some best practices regarding using Terminal Activities, some of those apply if you decide to use another method. Activities - Best practices
When using the terminal package, seems like I would need to provide information about the emulator for the connection string, is this correct? I am asking because I don’t have it, need to investigate it.
As pointed out by @mateuszmacheta CV is quite taxing, and furthermore is not as reliable as the more traditional approaches (Computer Vision relies on visually extracting the text).
Here’s a screenshot of the “Configure Connection” you will have to do with the Terminal Session activity:
Just install the Terminal Activities package in your Studio and take a look.
Using the Direct Connection you could “bypass” the emulater and connect directly to the “source”.
Read up on it here Activities - Terminal Session
