how call external class (contains selenium commands) in selenium test properly? - selenium

Question

I use Selenium Web Driver with JUnit in Eclipse. I want diminish my code by creating new classes for repitable steps. I want store this classes in separate files for convenience. For example this one of such classes:
import org.openqa.selenium.ie.InternetExplorerDriver;
//Login
public class Login {
private InternetExplorerDriver driver;
String url;
String name;
String password;
String language;
public Login (String ur, String nam, String pass, String lang){
url=ur;
name=nam;
password=pass;
language=lang;
}
public void log_in (){
driver.get(url);
driver.findElement(By.name("username")).sendKeys(name);
driver.findElement(By.name("password")).sendKeys(password);
driver.findElement(By.name("language")).sendKeys(language);
driver.findElement(By.name("logon_action")).click();
}
}
This is my main test:
package bobsworld;
import init.Login;
import org.junit.Assert;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.openqa.selenium.Alert;
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.ie.InternetExplorerDriver;
public class WebTest {
private WebDriver driver;
#Test
public void testUnit() throws Exception {
//Open new window
System.setProperty("webdriver.ie.driver", "IEDriverServer.exe");
driver = new InternetExplorerDriver();
//Login
init.Login login = new init.Login ("myurl", "log","pas","English");
login.log_in();
}
The problem is with object driver. I get java.lang.NullPointerException and can't execute test. How should I organize call to Login and code to make my test work?

Answer 1

What you try to achieve is a quite popular approach called "PageObjects".
Your issues:
Use some checkstyle tool to improve code quality
Do a whole lot of research about Java in general
The Login Class or "init.Login" (it's quite unusual to have a part of the package as prefix for the class) is not able to use the same WebDriver instance because you don't forward it. Normally you would have opened a second WebDriver instance but that seems to be impossible though I don't know your setup. You have to forward the "driver" as a parameter to the constructor of the Login class.
Try to use real PageObjects as described here inluding PageFactory to improve readability and maintainability