eBox is growing a lot lately, and updating screenshots is always a cumbersome task, so, prompted by a workmate, I decided to do something to get automatic screenshots.
The first step was to get an automatic way to install eBox from scratch to have something to get screenshots from. That was quite easy using the Xen facilities available in Debian. I only had to write a role for xen-create-image and now I can get an eBox up and running in a couple of minutes executing a simple “xen-create-image –role ebox –hostname ebox-screenshots”.
Using eBox introspection capabilities and some Perl magic, it was quite easy to autogenerate a list of the URLs that we should take screenshots from. Once we had the URL list and a running eBox all we have to do was to have a browser logging in the eBox web interface and loop through the URLs taking screenshots.
To achieve that I resorted to Ruby, Konqueror, KSnapshot and DCOP, and it took less than 40 lines of code to do it. The first problem was spawning Konqueror and KSnapshot instances and getting a DCOP reference for them, but that was easily done using Ruby’s fork, which is quiet convenient:
konqpid = Kernel.fork { exec("konqueror --geometry 1024x768+0+0") }
ksnappid = Kernel.fork { exec("ksnapshot") }
konqwin = KDE::DCOPRef.new("konqueror-#{konqpid}","konqueror-mainwindow\#1")
ksnapshot = KDE::DCOPRef.new("ksnapshot-#{ksnappid}","interface")
The second problem I faced was logging in the eBox interface, I had to enter the password and submit the form. Fortunately Konqueror’s DCOP interface offers a really nice “evalJS” function:
konqwin.openURL("https://#{ip}/ebox/")
konqhtml = KDE::DCOPRef.new("konqueror-#{konqpid}","html-widget1")
konqhtml.evalJS("document.getElementById('credential_0').value = 'ebox'")
konqhtml.evalJS("document.login.submit()")
and we’re in! 
Now we only have to loop through the urls taking the screenshots. I had a little problem because ksnapshot expects you to click the left mouse button before taking the screenshot. Fortunately that could be easily fixed using xte from the xautomation package to simulate the click.
urls.each { |url|
konqwin.openURL("https://#{ip}/ebox/#{url}")
name = "#{konqwin.caption.split(/-/)[1].strip.gsub(/ /,'_')}"
ksnapshot.slotGrab
system("xte 'mousemove 100 100' 'mouseclick 1'")
ksnapshot.save("#{outpath}/#{name}.png")
}
The code I pasted lacks a bit of initialization and some sleeps I put there to synchronize the stuff, but basically that’s all. I just love Ruby, KDE and DCOP 
