I have a project that requires automating a process on a website (login, click buttons, make decisions, etc.).
Ordinarily I would use something like curl to do the automation and not worry about the UI at all, however this site uses ASPX and redirects and is just a mess, so I need to write something like a selenium test to do it.
A selenium seems like a bit of a hack though, so I was wondering if there is any alternative or tool that may be better than selenium at walking the dom and "clicking" elements?
Guidance or examples appreciated.
A non programtic way would be to use Selenium IDE. Basically you record the events via a Firefox extension and can replay easily. I understand this is a non automating way as it requires a manual playback.
However one element that I really like is that I can use this extension to record my events and then generate scripts to automate playback via Selenium Remote Control drivers.
Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium
scripts. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to
record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire
Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back
tests in the actual environment that they will run in.
Yes I know you think selenium is a hack but it is rather pretty good!
Related
I want to write an acceptance test for my browser extension. I've tried to initiate an extension via selenium but I can't seem to access a content of popup. Can someone suggest how can I do it with selenium or any other way to write UI/acceptance tests for browser extensions? Thanks.
How can I access browser extension's popup using selenium?
It's not possible. Selenium supports interaction with web view only.
What you can do with Selenium and extension for sure is automatic installation: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16512012/2517622
You may try to use desktop automation tools (e.g. White on Windows platform) for clicking on extension popup but it's not that easy and it's not platform independent as Selenium.
Here is the workaround we came up. Unless someone posts here the "right" solution I will consider this as the best approach.
So eventually, our extension is an iframe which just loads a page content from our website + does some other neat stuff. We simply open that url in a new tab and do regular selenium tests.
Side not: we have considered to write a little javascript wrapper to be able to access ext via main window through javascript. E.g. there is some js in ext that listens to main window's events and perform certain actions. Tho, it is too much efforts and doesn't really sound like a proper acceptance test so we discarded this approach.
I am new to testing, when doing some research these last few days i found 2 tools that enable testing a web application, here is what i understand so far:
Selenium provides a way to manipulate the browser, so in other terms it enables simulating user interaction on a webPage, we can write tests using PhpUnit-Selenium extension for example and it will make it possible to test our application as a real user would, after that those tests need to run on different browsers...
For TestSwarm i need to write my tests using tools such as (Qunit, Jasmine...) that are mainly focused on unit testing (not user interaction ...) and use TestSwarm server to push those tests to available browsers to run them (i think this is automatic so no need for a user to manually run theses tests)
My conclusion is that Selenium and TestSwarm are somewhat complementary as Selenium enables testing user interaction overall, and TestSwarm simplifies testing javascript cross Browser.
Am i getting this right?
I think you are on the right track, here is an excerpt from https://github.com/jquery/testswarm/issues/258
Okay, so you're using WebDriver and your test suite is a set of instructions (in what language do you have it stored now?) for the browser to execute (go to page X, click button Y, etc.).
Those are not unit tests but integration tests. They require bindings with the browser and/or the ability to execute code on the target computer. They can't be executed from within the browser (in that if I visit the url of your test suite in my browser, nothing happens as the driver instructions need to be run from outside the browser or from a plugin).
TestSwarm is not designed for these kind of integration tests, but for unit tests. A very different method that simply can't be performed by TestSwarm. Also, you wouldn't need any of TestSwarm's features for this and you'd miss things you need instead (like actual browsers and the ability to control them and extract the results). Where those browsers come from there usually is something like TestSwarm close by.
I'd recommend looking into SauceLabs and Jenkins (either self-hosted or perhaps a cloud based solution like CloudBees).
Check out:
• http://sauceio.com/index.php/2012/12/getting-the-most-out-of-selenium-with-cloudbees-and-sauce-labs/
• https://saucelabs.com/jenkins/1
• http://www.cloudbees.com/platform-service-saucelabsondemand.cb
I have some scripts (AutoIt) browsing YouTube for list of trending videos etc. It involves no mouse clicks (just keystrokes). The script takes a long time to finish and I can't use my PC during this time (it needs the window activated to work on it).
Is there anything I can do about this? Can these scripts run from a server or some stuff like that?
I've run into a similar problem: got to run automation with AutoIt on a Windows Server and the whole thing had got to be headless. Using Remote Desktop simply didin't work because then I'd had to keep a client opened and maximized all the time.
Short solution: install a VNC server in the Windows Server, open a client from another computer, log in and close the client. As the AutoIt script was being started by a Jenkins job, before closing the client the Jenkins applet had to be started via web interface.
By the way, I've had this idea from this post: How to run remote headless GUI automation.
As Johannes said, AutoIt probably wouldn't be suitable (and likewise AutoHotkey), but you could check out the many GUI and web testing frameworks that exist for other languages. With some of those, you can run a "headless" browser (a program that navigates the web just like a browser, but has no visible window); or you can run a standard browser on a virtual display like a Xvfb X11 server. This would be easiest if the server (or wherever it's going to run) is running a Unix-like OS, but it may be possible with Windows too.
Selenium Webdriver seems to be a very popular choice for scripting and testing actual browsers. It's natively Java but has bindings for languages like Ruby. It can also hook into something called HtmlUnit, which is also Java; that's one of the more popular headless browsers. Another (a relative newcomer) is phantom.js, which is in Javascript but (again) has bindings for other languages.
As far as I know this will not work unless the user account is logged on. You could try to see if you could convert it to an exe and run this as a service, but even then I don't think this will work. Let me know if you found out!
You can either:
Hide your window (SetWindowState #SW_HIDE) or something like that...
and use ControlClicks (if the they are original controls!)
or
Hide your window and use SendControl
or
use SendKeepActive
or
use OLEObjects like ie.au3 for automation.
Good Luck
We have Xserver-less CentOS system for continuous integration. So no UI.
I want to run selenium test cases on it. I am using new Alpha version of Selenium2 which has WebDriver integration. It starts and ends browser by its own. Now, How do I start that in background? Something similar is possible with Internet Explorer?
I am able to run correctly on local machine. But it opens Firefox UI.
Are you able to run a virtual frame buffer? That way, all the GUI programs can believe there's graphics happening, even if there's no actual screen. You may wish to search for the term "headless". One example.
Another possibility may be to use Celerity - a ruby-based "headless browser". It uses the Watir interface (originally a competitor to selenium), which I understand to be merging with webdriver.
I want to test a Ajax based web application. I want to write the test scripts in Java and simulate the web browser.
Simulation of a web browser is very important since Iam using very advanced Ajax library like jQuery in the web Application.
Any ideas on how I should proceed?
I think you might want to give Selenium a look.
Kindness,
Dan
Doing "simulation" of a browser will probably not work that well if your application relies on Javascript a lot : there are some crawlers that you can use to test your application, but they don't like JS that much.
The best solution in your case might be to use a real browser to do your testing.
The Selenium tool-suite is quite nice for that : it allows your testing programm to pilot a browser (a real one : firefox, internet explorer, ...) ; which mean having you JS code executed exactly the same way that it would be with a "real" user.
For instance, you can have your testing programm tell a browser to open a page, click on a link, check some content in the page, ... And if there was some JS event plugged onto the link, it will have been executed : there will have been a real "click" on the link.
Using a tool like selenium has some drawbacks, though ; some of them are :
you need a machine with a graphic environnement, to launch the browsers (command line is not enough)
tests with selenium take time : browsing and using the application means loading all the CSS/JS/Images/ads/whatever, for each page ; like in a real browser -- because you are using a real browser
But these tests are quite nice, and usefull to test the application as a whole -- ie, more "functionnal tests" than "unit-test".