Recording does not work, even with IE
I realized that I was not fair in my previous test, as I used the last version of Firefox, which unfortunately is not officially supported by TestPartner. To give it a second chance, I decided to repeat the test with Internet Explorer. I re-recorded the same scenario, but this time in IE and tried to replay it.
I got a better result, but only slightly. The recorded script was able to log-in, but could not click the button to create a new mail:
The playback failed at step 12, where the tool tries to ‘Attach’ to an HTML frame, identified with ‘Name=c36gxk9p2bo3a’. Attaching to a UI control in TestPartner means simply declaring that the subsequent actions in the script will be executed within this control. c36gxk9p2bo3a is a generated name which changes each time when you enter GMail. This was the reason the script could not find the frame, when trying to replay.
If I had to code this script by hand, I would omit this step altogether. Usually it is sufficient to only attach to the browser window and not to specific frames within it. Also, I would not locate the other controls by ID and screen coordinates as the recording did in steps 13 and 14. This will likely fail too, even if the problematic step 12 is fixed.