Selenium Page Object pattern error pages handling - selenium

Question

I've got a generic question concerning error pages.
Imagine a simple use case, good (1) and bad (2) authentication.
In case (1), we've got the index page.
In case (2), we've got a specific error page.
The point is, I've got a page object LoginPage, and the submitLoginForm should return the next page. I click on it with a bad login form filled in.
Then, we've got 2 options for handling it:
- should we create a LoginErrorPage and give LoginPage a submitNonValidLoginForm returning this LoginErrorPage ?
- should we useLoginPage with submitLoginForm returning the 'right' navigation page IndexPage, and in the Junit test, assert on the driver real state (hasn't got IndexPage elements but some others).
I hope I'm clear !
Thank you

Answer 1

From my personal experience I can say it tends to be better to have different Page Objects for (conceptually) different pages, even when we're talking about the same URL with different content.
So I suggest following your first option, creating a LoginError Page Object. Another thing is that the page validation should be done in your Page Object, not as a test because your creating a dependency between the test and Selenium directly.
I.E (in a very pseudocodish way)
class BasePage {
constructor (driver, context, isLoaded = false) {
this->webDriver = driver
//clicking links or submitting forms from other page objects
//will trigger the page load at driver level so we don't want to trigger a page reload
if (isLoaded) {
this->loadPage()
}
this->validatePage()
}
loadPage() {
this->webDriver->get(this->getPageUrl)
}
abstract validatePage()
abstract getPageUrl()
}
class LoginPage extends BasePage{
validatePage() {
this->elementUsername = this->webDriver->findElement(WebDriverBy::id('username'))
this->elementPassword = this->webDriver->findElement(WebDriverBy::id('password'))
this->elementSubmit = this->webDriver->findElement(WebDriverBy::id('submit'))
}
getPageUrl() {
return '/login/'
}
fillUser(value) {
this->elementUsername->sendKeys(value)
}
fillPassword(value) {
this->elementPassword->sendKeys(value)
}
submitValid() {
this->elementSubmit->submit()
return new DashboardPage(this->webDriver, this->context, true)
}
submitInvalid() {
this->elementSubmit->submit()
return new LoginErrorPage(this->webDriver, this->context, true)
}
}
class DashboardPage extends BasePage {
validatePage() {
this->webDriver->findElement(WebDriverBy::id('welcomeMessage'))
}
getPageUrl() {
return '/dashboard/'
}
}
At this point your tests will only have to sort out the webdriver fixture but don't have to know anything about your pages
testValidCredentials:
login = new LoginPage(..)
login->fillUser('john')
login->fillPassword('aa')
dashboard = login->submitValid()
testInvalidCredentials:
login = new LoginPage(..)
login->fillUser('john')
login->fillPassword('aa')
loginError = login->submitInvalid()
testWelcomeMessage:
dashboard = new DashboardPage(..)
// a bad (but short enough) example, don't actually do this
assert(true, regexp('welcome', dashboard->getSource))
L.E.
From a testing perspective you have to know your expected result. Another approach would be to have a single submit that accepts expected page object as param
testInvalidCredentials:
login = new LoginPage(..)
login->fillUser('john')
login->fillPassword('aa')
loginError = login->submit('LoginErrorPage')
assertContains('invalid login', loginError->getErrorMessages())
But after writing 100 tests you'll find this to be too verbose and, if the page received after a successful submit changes, you'll have a lot of rewriting to do.