Dan Fabulich wrote on 11/30/2005 05:27:28 PM: > One of the side projects I've been working on this week is to try using > JsUnit as a runner for Selenium tests, instead of HTML-table Selenese. > This would make it easier to write complicated tests with conditionals, > loops, etc..
Nice... JavaScript syntax for Selenium tests has been on my wish list for a while. > (I can't be the first person to have thought of this...? Didn't Selenium > at one time depend on JsUnit?) Selenium tests itself with table-style functional tests and comes with JsUnit unit tests for the core Selenium code. Selenium used to depend on JsUnit for its library of assert commands, but later on we decided to nix that dependency and use our own API. Before Selenium was created, I gave a look at JsUnit before deciding to write my own tool. A few things kept me from just sticking with JsUnit. The biggest reason is that JsUnit looked like it could easily handle the testing of single, discreet web pages... But it couldn't handle (and is not meant to handle) the transitions between pages (e.g.: enter data in a form, click a button, wait for new page, then proceed with the next command)-- aka "login to logout" style tests. Also, the JsUnit docs say that you could make the hidden iframe visible (like Selenium does)-- but only in IE. And I like the "stepping debugger" aspect of Selenium's interface for slowly stepping through tests to find out where and how a test failed. I didn't see how to easily do that with JsUnit. Lastly, at the time, I was enamored with Ward's FIT Framework, and its promise of "tests that people can read". Once I realized that JsUnit wasn't really meant for my idea of functional testing, Selenium started out as an experiment to implement FIT in JavaScript in the browser. FIT/tables-style Selenium is not going away, but I've since come around to supporting the idea of using plain old JavaScript syntax for tests when you need to do more complicated stuff than simple procedural commands (conditionals, loops, function definitions, etc.) In this case, I'd like to move to API similar to Watir's, but written in JavaScript. Anyway... there are lots of good ideas to borrow from in each project. > Anyway, it turns out to be pretty easy to use Selenium in a JsUnit > context. JsUnit's TestRunner.html defines a handy invisible iframe that's > pretty analogous to SeleniumRunner.html's "imyframe". You access it like > this: > (snip, snip) > The main tricky part turns out to be waiting for events. (snip, snip) > Many people have remarked about this as a weakness in JsUnit for testing > asynchronous events. This is an area that we do have working in Selenium. Although there is a proposal from Bret Pettichord to change or improve how we do it in Selenium. Getting the browser to wait is damn tricky business. Read these two posts from some "color commentary" on the subject. http://www.josephmoore.net/2005/11/non-cpu-intensive-javascript-wait-loop.html http://www.josephmoore.net/2005/11/using-seleniums-waitforvalue.html > I've found a reasonable kludge for this, which I've > posted to the JsUnit mailing list (free subscription required): > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jsunit/message/460 Yes, requiring a Java applet or ActiveX control to implement a wait command is very kludgey. :-) > Putting the two together, you can use Selenium and the BrowserBot very > effectively in pure JsUnit tests to write your tests in pure JavaScript. Because of the timing/event issues... I'm thinking it might be easier to run pure JavaScript tests in Selenium's TestRunner test harness than running Selenium tests in JsUnit's TestRunner. I think the way forward with this is to replace Selenium's parsing of a Selenium table with a simple "eval" of a pure JavaScript test and see what happens. > Is this helpful to anyone? Am I the only one who prefers writing tests in > JavaScript rather than HTML-table Selenese? Yes, this is helpful (to me at least)... And I know for sure you're not the only one who'd like to write their Selenium tests in pure JavaScript. -Jason _______________________________________________ Selenium-users mailing list Selenium-users@lists.public.thoughtworks.org http://lists.public.thoughtworks.org/mailman/listinfo/selenium-users
