Testing a live website with QUnit - testing

Question

Can I test live websites using QUnit? For example, can I write a test that says:
Go to google.com
Enter a search term
Click 'Google Search'
Check there are 10 results and 2 ads
Would QUnit be an appropriate tool for this kind of "live" testing?

Answer 1

You can achieve that using qunit if qunit is the only tool/testing framework that is available for you and the page you will be testing allows GET requests.
How to do that qunit is you can make an ajax call to the page you are testing using JSONP and get the response. Then you would assert certain elements on the response exists.
For google, google itself has a very complex page structure on search results, I would not even attempt to do anything like this.
I would use qunit for testing javascript components on their own without dependencies.
If you are looking for another tool to do this task, I would recommend Selenium, which would do exactly what you want.
Good luck.

Answer 2

Do you want to test a website you own or a random live website?
If you want to test your own website
you can embed the live site in a iframe and perform actions in the user interface in your tests.
If you want to test live websites like google.com you need to do this server side since you can't access them from javascript/QUnit.
When you where the owner of a site like google.com you could do:
var submitted = false;
function starttests(){
if(!submitted)
test("testInput", function() {
expect(1);
submitted = true;
var dom = iframe.contentWindow || iframe.contentWindow.document;
jQuery(dom).find('input[type=text]').val("Testing google.com");
jQuery(dom).find('form').submit();
ok( true, "form submitted" );
});
else
test("testResult", function() {
var dom = iframe.contentWindow || iframe.contentWindow.document;
// Check for elements in dom.
});
}
iframe.onload(starttests);
iframe.src = "http://google.com";