Creating an array with variables

Question

I am relatively new to Delphi so please bear with me. Basically, I need to set variables as different values based on whether or not I am testing in an English or French translated environment. All menus in these TC scripts are accessed by their names and in French they are not the same. I can, however, access them by their position in the menu - such as [4|2].

I have a list of constants and would like to set up an array to set MenuItem1 to either File|New or [4|2] depending on the value of tcDecimalSeparator <> '.' (set as a declared constant).

Does this make sense? What would be the easiest / best way to do this?

I know I could probably set this all up with data driven testing but I don't want to rework the scripts that much prior to release.

Are you really having trouble creating an array and choosing a value from it? Or are you instead asking how to test multilingual programs? Also, keep in mind that if you're writing TestComplete scripts, you're not really using Delphi. You're using something that *looks* like Delphi, but doesn't really have all the same features, so the "delphi" tag on this question might be a red herring. — Rob Kennedy, Sep 21 '11 at 18:26
Valid point. I'm more familiar with VB and trying to feel my way through this. I'll remove the Delphi tag - thanks for the input! — GreenMtnGal, Sep 21 '11 at 18:46

Rob Kennedy · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-21T18:33:19.310

No, your proposed solution does not make sense. First, switching based on the current decimal separator is unreliable. Second, if you already know the positions of the menu items, and they always work, regardless of the program's language, then why mess around with the English menu captions at all? Just use the menu positions all the time. (Or, if you already have something set up to select the menu text based on the language, why not also use the French menu text instead of switching between English text and French positions?)

To do what you propose, you can set up a two-dimensional array of menu identifiers:

const
  TLanguage = (lEnglish, lFrench);
  TUIElement = (uiFileNew, uiFileOpen, ...);

  MenuIDs = array[TUIElement] of array[TLanguage] of string = (
    ('File|New', '[4|2]'),
    ('File|Open', '[4|3]')
  );

Then, when you want a string, select the item that corresponds to your UI element, and then select the string for the current language:

if tcDecimalSeparator = '.' then
  CurrentLang := lEnglish
else
  CurrentLang := lFrench;

UseMenuItem(MenuIDs[uiFileNew, CurrentLang]);

I had thought about that myself... the original person who wrote the scripts had commented out the menu items by position and instead switched to using the menu text so I assumed that it wasn't the preferred way of accessing it! My guess is that the application was changing so much at the time that it was too hard for her to remember to change the values each time around. I appreciate the information! — GreenMtnGal, Sep 21 '11 at 18:50

Creating an array with variables

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