Automated GUI testing with JS and AJAX

[Meir Kriheli]

Hi,

On 09/03/2009 03:48 PM, Leonid Podolny wrote:
> Hi, all,
> At my work we encountered a problem and it looks like we are
> re-inventing the bicycle. Someone here surely has an experience with
> that.
> We have a regressions testing lab. As a part of the testing we have to
> work with the web-interface of our product. (I'm intentionally vague,
> the details are quite irrelevant to the problem). The testing scenario
> includes action items like "press the button with caption 'Advanced
> Settings' on it".
> This is implemented as a C program with sockets interface, so "find a
> button" actually means "look for a substring in the received HTML
> code" and "press the button" means "create an HTTP POST message and
> send it".
> However, recently we have added some JavaScript and AJAX to the
> web-interface and now the testing environment must be able to run JS
> and even cope with things like replacing part of the DOM tree. We can
> see three possible directions to tackle the problem:
> - Further fix our great testing program. After all, we know what AJAX
> can return -- we can manually open the connection it would open, parse
> the response, etc. Looks ugly and has a potential to turn into
> maintenance nightmare.
> - Setup a headless X server with Firefox running inside and some sort
> of scripting/management add-on. If someone has an experience with such
> a setup, I would appreciate pointers to specific add-ons you used.
> - Somehow hack off the GUI from any open-source browser and link it to
> our program, i.e. use it as HTML parser and JS machine. Looks
> unpredictably complicated, maybe not even feasible.
> 

Try selenium:
http://seleniumhq.org/

Cheers
--
Meir Kriheli