Check whether a film still matches your app
Find out which films your app has outgrown, and on which lines, without recording anything.
A film is only right until the app changes. A freshness check tells you which films no longer match the app, and exactly which screens changed.
Before you start
- The film has been built at least once.
- The app is running at the address the film records from.
In the app
- Open the film and go to Files.
- Under Freshness, press Check now.
The film then shows fresh if every screen still matches, or app changed with the number of screens that differ. The same chip shows on the Films page. For each changed screen, Files shows a picture: the film on the left, the app now in the middle with each change boxed in red, and the changed pixels.
In the terminal
Check every built film in the project:
showreel freshCheck only some films:
showreel fresh compose setupAdd --profile for an app you sign in to. The pictures are saved as films/<film>/fresh/<line>.png.
How it checks
The film's steps run again at speed, with no voice and nothing recorded. At each line, the screen is compared with the film at the same moment. Small differences from video compression and text smoothing are ignored, but a relabelled button counts as much as a new page. A line is out of date when part of the screen changed, when the whole screen differs, or when the steps can no longer reach it because a control was renamed or removed.
Things that change by themselves
Dates, clocks and counts change on their own. List them in the app profile so they are blanked before the comparison:
"fresh": { "ignore": ["time", ".last-updated"] }In the web app
When you are signed in, each result is sent to the service. The web app marks a film's newest recording app changed on the Recordings page, with a note on the recording and on its link's page in Links.