Since long I have been trying a complete & cheap (free) tool to automate the UI based testing. Since when I learnt about automated testing , I knew about screen recording based test technologies such as Winrunner &
HP QuickTest Professional, which also supports scripting using a proprietary Test Script Language(TST). Though QuickTest Professional serves most of the purpose I was looking for, but I didn't like it because of two primary reasons. First being its high license cost and second its proprietary software which needs to be installed on developer's/tester's PC.
I kept searching for better solutions as per my needs (free/cheap solution) and got a lot of hope when I first learnt about recording based UI testing supported by
Selenium, I was very excited. Later Selenium started supporting script based test scenario creation which was a big aid to create the automated test cases. Later I learnt about about Java based test tool
Watij. This was a big improvement in the world of UI based automation testing.
Creating test cases in Watij or Selenium is very easy. If you have clear understanding of
DOM, it becomes much more simpler. Here are some examples of sample test script statements.
IE ie = new IE();
ie.start("http://yogendrakrsingh.blogspot.com/");
assertTrue(ie.containsText("/MY LEARNINGS/"));
To set some text field value, you can simply write as
ie.textField(id,"myTextId").set("My Value");
To click some button, you can simply write as
ie.button(value,"My Botton").click();
Similarly in Selenium a simple test script could be as following:
selenium.open("http://yogendrakrsingh.blogspot.com/");
selenium.waitForPageToLoad("1000");
verifyTrue(selenium.isTextPresent("MY LEARNINGS"));
To set some text field value, you can simply write as
selenium.type("myTextId", "My Value");
To click some button, you can simply write as selenium.click("myButton");
Though both Selenium and Watij were very easy to use, both were having limitation in handling Modal dialogs. This limitation proved fatal and all my attempts to use either of them(Selenium/Watij) as automated UI test tools became unsuccessful. Some time back, I learnt the trick to handle ModalDialog using Watij vr. 3.2.1. To handle a Modal Dialog in Watij, created a method in watij.runtime.ie.IE java file as below:
public ModalDialog modalDialogNested() throws Exception {
waitUntilReady();
final OleMessageLoop modalDialogMessageLoop = new OleMessageLoop("modalDialogMessageLoop");
final ModalDialogFinder modalDialogFinder = new ModalDialogFinder((int) hwnd, modalDialogMessageLoop);
modalDialogMessageLoop.doStart();
modalDialogMessageLoop.doInvokeAndWait(modalDialogFinder);
return new IEModalDialog(modalDialogFinder.getHtmlDocument(),
modalDialogMessageLoop, modalDialogFinder.getIE());
}
Then another trick is to open a modal dialog in a new Java Thread so that main thread is not in waiting state. This provides you the control to write and execute further UI test script in the modal dialog. Sample test script could be as below:
ie.frame(id,"testFrame").textField(id, "inpField").set("Hello! Test very success");
new Thread(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
try {
ie.button(id,"mybutton").click();
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}).start();
ModalDialog modalDialog = ie.modalDialogNested();
modalDialog.textField(id, "inpField").set("Hello! test success");
final Button myButton = modalDialog.button(id,"mybutton");
new Thread(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
try {
myButton.click();
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}).start();
ModalDialog modalDialogChild = modalDialog.modalDialog();
modalDialogChild.textField(id, "inpField").set("Hello! Test success ultimate");
modalDialogChild.button(value, "Close").click();
modalDialog.button(value, "Close").click();
Thus I was able to overcome the Modal Dialog limitation of Watij and all set to use Watij as complete UI automation test tool.
Webspec is newer version of Watij with more simpler and powerful syntax. This works on IE, Firefox and Safari with platform support of Windows, Linux and Mac. Along with its simpler command based statements, its also supports the power of
JQuery.
To perform the above kind of tasks through WebSpec, we can write statements as below:
WebSpec spec = new WebSpec().ie();
spec.open("http://yogendrakrsingh.blogspot.com/");
spec.find("title").with("My Learnings").shouldExist();
To handle the modal dialog in Webspec, you need to implement html dialog listener by following steps below:
com.jniwrapper.win32.ie.Browser browser = spec.getBrowser().getPeer();
browser.setHtmlDialogListener(new MyHtmlDialogListener(){
public void show(HtmlDialogEvent event){
HTMLDialog myDialog = event.getDialog();
HTMLDocument dialogDocument = myDialog.getDocument();
//perform your steps in the modal dailog document here
}
});
Webspec is currently in active development. We need to refer their latest release documents to get familiar with latest updates.
