New Post: Dealing with "prompts"

Hello Pat,

Thanks for taking the time to look into my problem. I agree theres lots of good information on here and i'm getting little bits from here and there, but im at a stage now where I think I just need the gentle nudge in the right direction.

So here's the situtation... We are using a system called OpenVMS. What i'm attempting to do is to create an automation test suite in C#, its going well so far but everyone still has to manually run batch jobs in openVMS to complete the financial transactions. I dont like having manual steps in my tests! :)

So far i've been able to send commands and read responses no problem, the only issue is when theres a prompt. The issue isnt detecting the prompt I can do that easily its then dealing with the prompt... let me show you my code..

        string myCommand = command;
        myCommand = myCommand.TrimEnd();
        TimeSpan commandTime;
        Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch();
        string result = "";
        string output = "";
        var cmd = client.CreateCommand(myCommand);

        try
        {
            stopwatch.Start();
            var asynch = cmd.BeginExecute();
            var resultStream = new StreamReader(cmd.OutputStream);

            while (!asynch.IsCompleted)
            {
                commandTime = stopwatch.Elapsed;
                if (commandTime > timeOut)
                {
                    break;
                }
                result = resultStream.ReadToEnd();
                output = output + result;
                Debug.WriteLine(result);
            }
            cmd.CancelAsync();
            cmd.EndExecute(asynch);
            resultArray = output.Split(new char[] { '\r', '\n' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
            WebDriver.myLogger.LogComment("Class: " + MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().DeclaringType.FullName);
            WebDriver.myLogger.LogComment("Method: " + MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().Name);
            WebDriver.myLogger.LogPass("Executed VMS command: " + myCommand);
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            WebDriver.myLogger.LogComment("Class: " + MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().DeclaringType.FullName);
            WebDriver.myLogger.LogComment("Method: " + MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().Name);
            WebDriver.myLogger.LogFail("Error executing VMS command: " + myCommand + " | " + ex.Message);
        }
        WebDriver.TestLog().LogStep(WebDriver.TestLog().GetTestResult(), "Execute command");

What I need to be able to do is when i detect the prompt... somewhow change my command "cmd" to something like "Text\R" which would input text and a return...
ive not yet worked out how to do this yet because it wont build if i try. I thought maybe I could just cancel the command when it hits the prompt and create a new one, and execute that, but that doesnt work either.

I'm sorry if im not explaining this very clearly, as I said I know how to detect the prompts thats not an issue I just need some way of dealing with them.

In OpenVMS we have DCL's (Digital Command Language) I can use this to run whats known as an ARL (Advanced Reporting Language) and I can do this by creating a text file, filling it with the parameters and then basically saying okay VMS run this ARL and use this text file as your input....Im wondering if I can do that with this? Send a command with a list of parameters to use when it detects prompts....