General Development Discussions

Hi
I have worked on QTP for a long time and have quite extensive experience on it. Now, I am trying to automate my web based application using etester (Oracle Application Suite), I am facing difficulties. Do you have a documents/any resource which can point out how we can perform certain tasks in Empirix comparing it with QTP.

Here are some more specific questions:

1) I see that there are no direct way to perform certain tasks in etester as they are in QTP. As an example, I have to test different instances of my web based application using the same recorded script. In QTP I could have simply parameterized the URL and have fed that into script. In empirix I wasn't able to find out any method which could parameterize URL . One solution I got was to go with "meta-refresh".

2) What can we do when at run time Etester is not able to identify certain objects?

3) Can we perform operations on say an excel that gets popped up from the application?

I have gone through the basic tutorials, I am looking for some advanced docs. Any inputs would be great.