Run a key press event before or during application initialisation

Hi,

The issue I currently have is a little tricky to explain, so feel free to ask for clarification :)

I’m running wpf. tests on an in-house application. Our application uses integrated logins, so usually when I do standard workflows, I let the app login automatically with my personal credentials. However, at times I need to log in as a different user. In daily use we do this by holding down F2 to break the integration and allow manual login.

Previously I could accomplish this during testing by a small coded step with a keyboard.keyUp/Down event. However, this only worked because of an old inherent error in the test application that would cause the initialisation of the application to be halted until a dialogue was accepted, allowing us to insert the keyboard event before full app boot up.

And now we get to the issue at hand: Since I updated to current version of Test Studio and Runtime, that particular error message caused TS to lose focus on start-up and the tests failed because of this. The developers then fixed the error, so the message would not appear and the tests would run alright. BUT, without the error message dialogue, the initialisation of the application is not paused by anything, and the keypress event doesn’t happen at the critical point. Thus, I never get the login box and am not able to proceed with these particular tests.

So, based on this, can you think of a way to introduce the F2 key event at the moment of initialisation? Or alternatively, is there a way to pass arguments to execute the application so we can program a different start-up behaviour depending on the test?

Thank you,

Jakob