Ranorex Forum

I'm running Ranorex 5.3.1 on Windows. Starting today, I am getting a message in Chrome that my Flash debug plugin is out of date. This breaks all of my tests.

I tried upgrading to 5.3.2 and running the Instrumentation Wizard, but this didn't correct the problem. Any idea how I can get running again?

Hi tbailey,

Chrome 42 unfortunately dropped the support for the NPAPI Flash player and from now on just supports the PPAPI one. The problem now is that the Flash preloader does no longer work with the PPAPI one which is needed by Ranorex to identify the elements in a Flash/Flex application.
This can unfortunately not be fixed from our site, so we depend on Adobe that they will release a fix.

A workaround is to use Chromium instead, since Chromium still allows to use the NPAPI Flash player. Chromium is supported with the new Ranorex version 5.3.2.
You should then be able to start Chromium with this arguments:
chrome.exe --ppapi-flash-path="C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\NPSWF32_*_*_*_*.dll" --allow-outdated-plugins (*-> for Version)

Another workaround is to add the Ranorex library in code, as described here: Adobe Flash: Load the Ranorex Lib into your Flash application.

Thank you for your understanding.

Regards,
Markus

Hi all,

It seems that we found a workaround for the issue.
We found a setting in Chrome which allows you to enable the NPAPI Flash Player.
The setting can be found using the following link:

chrome://flags/#enable-npapi

Please enable the NPAPI setting and rerun the instrumentation wizard.
After doing so, the Ranorex Preloader should work as expected.

Regards,
Bernhard

My understanding is that the Chrome team left this in temporarily and that this setting will be removed in a future version.

Hi krstcs,

Yes, I think so too, but I hope Adobe will fix the issue in the meantime.

Regards,
Bernhard

Hi Bernhard,

I did the workaround (chrome://flags/#enable-npapi), and I can find elements again,
but I have many flash problems now, objects sometimes doesn't loaded.
Also I saw that from chrome 45 this wont be available anymore, should we stop working with chrome?
Note:
Installing adobe 18 (beta) solve some problems.

Regards
Tzahi

Hi Tzahi,

we hope Adobe will fix the issue soon that we don't need the workaround any more.
We are also looking at the beta version of Adobe 18 and investigate what we can do.

Regards,
Bernhard

What is the status on this issue? I've enabled the NPAPI flag in chrome and re instrumented flash as normal. Now I get a black screen for flash Brightcove videos when I hover over them.

Would be nice if we somehow could get the PPAPI debugger flash working with flex objects in Ranorex.

I have a problem using NPAPI on my Vmware machines because of the website I am crawling works best with the PPAPI.


I wonder if anyone here ever got PPAPI debugger working with Ranorex ?

Hi,

I am afraid that as previously stated there is not yet a way to use the preloader approach with the PPAPI Flash player, this is simply because the Flash preloader does not yet work with the PPAPI Flash player.
Besides that, we are currently evaluating the beta version of Flash player 18 to check if the preloader will work again, with Flash player 18.

As also stated it works with the PPAPI Flash player when you use the Automation Lib approach: Adobe Flash: Load the Ranorex Lib into your Flash application.
This works since you do not need the preloader when you directly link the Ranorex Lib into your Flash application.

Regarding the Brightcove videos, does this also happen when you don't use Ranorex and when Flash is not instrumented?

Regards,
Markus

Sorry for the late reply, no videos play fine when you don't use Ranorex with instrumented flash.

Hi anc44,

In order to analyze the issue in more detail, would it be possible to get access to your Flash application?
This would help us in faster analyzing the issue.
If you do not want to share it here, you can also send it to [email protected].

Thanks,
Markus