selenium – Benedetti Tech

UI Unit Testing with Selenium – Part 4 – Selenium Server

Last time, I went over more advanced uses of Webdriver as well as putting together a framework of shared methods which can be hooked up to unit tests. For this last post, I’ll be standing up an instance of Selenium Server on Amazon Web Services and refactoring the test framework to point to that instance for testing.

What is Selenium Server?

Selenium Server is basically a hosted service that can accept and run Selenium tests independent of the actual testing client. This allows for shared infrastructure that can be accessed by various clients without repeating the provisioning and setup of WebDriver files and other libraries.

For the provisioning of Selenium Server, I’ve decided to try out Amazon Web Services Elastic Computing service. If you’re curious about AWS and want to take it for a spin, you can sign up for a free trial period that’s currently 1 year! Information on EC2 and a link to sign up for the free trial is available at this link.

Standing up Selenium Server on AWS EC2

So first, I need a host. After signing up for my free trial, provisioning an EC2 virtual machine using Windows Server only took a few minutes.

Then, I was able to copy over the Selenium Server JAR file and the Chrome WebDriver.exe. Both of these can be found at the Selenium downloads page here.

Additionally, since the service is a Java Virtual Machine, I needed to install a Java Runtime Environment located here.

With my host, runtime and libraries in place, it’s time to start the service itself. This involves a simple command line statement. Elements show the location of the Chrome WebDriver on the EC2 host and I’ve also created a log file to keep track of any activity.

java -jar -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=C:\ChromeWebDriver\chromedriver.exe C:\SeleniumServer\selenium-server-standalone-3.0.1.jar -log “C:\\SeleniumServer\SeleniumLog.txt”

Refactoring the test project

Once the host is available, it’s just a matter of starting the host and telling the framework where it’s located. This requires the download of an additional NuGet package called OpenQA.Selenium.Remote which gives you access to the RemoteWebDriver class. Then I updated my Login and InternalLogin methods to use that as the framework’s IWebDriver object instead of the local one.

With these changes in place, my tests passed with flying colors. While I chose not to run tests in anything but Chrome this time around, adding additional platforms for testing is as easy as adding the drivers to Selenium Server and then updating the DesiredCapabilities argument of the RemoteWebDriver object.

To wrap it all up, I committed my refactor to my SeleniumFramework repo on GitHub. Please feel free to look at the updated version and pass along any feedback you might have.

Again, I hadn’t expected this series to take as long as it did, but it feels good to bring it to a close with some working code to show for it. As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them here or address them to john@benedettitech.com.

Thanks for looking in!

UI Unit Testing with Selenium – Part 3 – Advanced Webdriver & A Real World Example

Last time, I got into the basics of Webdriver and put together a couple of tests against ServiceNow. For this post, I’m going to take a look at more advanced uses of Webdriver as well as putting together a framework of shared methods which can be hooked up to unit tests. This involved going a little off script for the original course, but I think this series might be better served demonstrating application of the actual content rather than repeating it.

The goals that I have for this post will involve creating a new Solution with a Unit Test project as well as a Selenium framework class that can be reused within multiple tests. Again, I’ll be testing against my private dev instance of ServiceNow, but I think it will be readily apparent how the framework could be extended as needed for other web frameworks.

I began by first creating a new testing project in Visual Studio, called SeleniumFrameworkTests. Then I added the following tests based on the activities I demonstrated in the previous post.

LoginAsUser
LoginAsSuperUser
CreateIncidentAsUser
CreateIncidentAsSuperUser

I knew I’d want each test to be completely abstracted from the plumbing of ServiceNow, so I kept each test down to three arguments: environment, username and password. The environment would hold the URL of the instance we’re connecting to. And the username and password would contain those values for the account role needed to perform the tasks. Lastly, I created an app.config file to hold the values.

Next, I created the main framework class called SeleniumFramework. This framework class would need to include the Selenium and Selenium.Support packages from NuGet. With that in place, I created the general Login method which accepts the environment, username and password arguments. Then I copied the login steps from the previous post. This allowed both the LoginAsUser and LoginAsSuperUser tests to pass.

The CreateIncident methods proved to be a little trickier. First, each would require it’s own IWebDriver object with a valid login in order to proceed. It made more sense to create a private method that returns an IWebDriver object for use by the CreateIncident methods.

With that in place, I copied in the CreateIncident steps from the previous post. The CreateIncidentAsUser test then passed but the SuperUser role has a different interface than the base User. To get that test to pass, I had to create a separate method and tweak the UI names as needed for the test to then pass.

To wrap it all up, I created a new repo on Github called SeleniumFramework. Please feel free to take it for a spin yourself. All you’ll need is a demo instance of ServiceNow as well as a copy of Visual Studio Community, both of which are free!

I know this series has taken much longer than I expected. However, I plan to close it out next time with an implementation of Selenium Server, most likely using the above testing project.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them here or address them to john@benedettitech.com.

Thanks for looking in!

UI Unit Testing with Selenium – Part 2 – Webdriver Basics

Last time, I did a quick run-through of Selenium IDE for Firefox and got acquainted with the interface and commands associated with Selenium. This time, I’m diving more into the meat of the framework and using Webdriver.

Webdriver is an API for that can be used by various languages (C#, Java, Python, & Ruby are some examples) that allows your tests to be maintained and run directly from code rather than using a recorder. This allows us to take a more programmatical approach to testing rather than relying on the recorder exclusively.

We will be using Visual Studio for this example. Firefox is supported right out of the box, but IE and Chrome require a special binary to be staged locally in order for those browsers to be used with Selenium. This (and others) can be located via links at SeleniumHQ.

Since Chrome is my own preferred browser, I’m glad to move away from Firefox and experiment with something a bit more familiar. I decided to start with rerunning the test that I created using Selenium IDE previously, then build on that a bit.

One feature that I didn’t mention about Selenium IDE, is the export function. This creates source code in your chosen framework (C#, Java, etc.) from the Selenium markup code created by the recorder.

One cool thing about the export is that it intersperses the markup within your code as comments. This can be very useful when retracing what was done in a recording or for general documentation.

First off, I created a C# console project and installed the Selenium Webdriver plugin from NuGet. With that in place, I’ve added the export from my previous post to a new project to test with Chrome. My code is below:

using OpenQA.Selenium;

using OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome;

namespace WebDriverDemo

{

class Program

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

IWebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(@”C:\Libraries\”);

driver.Navigate().GoToUrl(“https://dev20556.service-now.com/navpage.do”);

driver.SwitchTo().Frame(“gsft_main”);

driver.FindElement(By.Name(“user_name”)).Click();

driver.FindElement(By.Id(“user_name”)).Clear();

driver.FindElement(By.Id(“user_name”)).SendKeys(“USERNAMEGOESHERE”);

driver.FindElement(By.Id(“user_password”)).Clear();

driver.FindElement(By.Id(“user_password”)).SendKeys(“PASSWORDGOESHERE”);

driver.FindElement(By.Id(“sysverb_login”)).Click();

}

This sample using the export from my previous post results in a successful login. Now to build on it a little bit and create a test Incident:

driver.FindElement(By.LinkText(“Incidents”)).Click();

driver.SwitchTo().Frame(“gsft_main”);

driver.FindElement(By.Id(“new_incident”)).Click();

SelectElement urgency = new SelectElement(driver.FindElement(By.Name(“IO:5a33d0ef0a0a0b9b007b906f6c589c57”)));

urgency.SelectByText(“1 – High”);

driver.FindElement(By.Name(“IO:3f272c500a0a0b990059c24380a2bc02”)).SendKeys(“Creating a test incident.”);

driver.FindElement(By.Name(“submit_button”)).Click();

Just adding these few extra lines results in a repeatable New Incident test.

incidentsuccess

It’s easy to start to see how this framework can be used to build a library of repeatable tests to automate QA and regression testing.

Link to the Full .NET API : http://seleniumhq.github.io/selenium/docs/api/dotnet/

As I continue to progress through the Pluralsight course, my next post should cover advanced WebDriver concepts and possibly Selenium Server.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them here or address them to john@benedettitech.com.

Thanks for looking in!

UI Unit Testing with Selenium – Part 1

So, I’m making it through the Selenium Pluralsight course slowly but surely and I’m learning quite a bit so far.

The first part covers a browser plug-in called Selenium IDE. Available only for Firefox, it’s essentially a session recording tool, It records what we do in the browser then parses those into commands and then can be played back to act as tests. To take this out for a spin, I went ahead and installed the plug-in and watched the demo on the course. Now, we’ll need to find something suitable to test it on.

There’s a SaaS platform called ServiceNow that I’ve been spending a great deal of time in this year. Automating testing against this platform from a central host is one of my goals for this experiment. To test this out, I’ve created a test instance of ServiceNow and a test user. Also, I’ve installed the Selenium IDE on Firefox so that I can record my session in the platform.

My demo is basically automating a login for my test user. First I’ll need to create a fresh test case in Selenium.

Then, I’ll record the steps to the login to get a complete test.

Then I’ll run the test and see if it logs me into the system, which it does.

This is just scratching the surface of Selenium and I have more modules in the course to cover. Next post, I’ll have some additional content from the next module (Selenium Web Driver) and possibly a little more.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them here or address them to john@benedettitech.com.

Thanks for looking in!

UI Unit Testing with Selenium – An Experiment

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Part writers block and part outside obligations. I know you’ve all been despondent and lost in the meantime. Sorry about that. 🙂

Something that’s a recurring puzzle for me is adapting unit testing to MVC and SaaS solutions. The challenges from my point of view are that MVC implies a lot of its functionality. For example, things in MVC behave in very specific manners based on where they’re located or what they’re named. Also, MVC classes (models) generally don’t have or need default constructors, so a traditional approach of instantiating a class an running business logic is insufficient.

Then, for SaaS solutions, you may not have sufficient access to the plumbing to build your tests directly, so you’re stuck automating a session through the SaaS provider’s interface and (hopefully) capturing the results that you need. An approach to MVC might look very similar.

Enter Selenium

Either my Google-fu is weak in this space or there aren’t a lot of options for automating tests in this manner. One framework that gets a lot of mentions is Selenium, so I’m going to take a stab at it. I’ve found a few good blog resources but also remember that John Sonmez did a Pluralsight course that seems to be right up my alley.

My plan for this week is to watch the course and play around with the framework against a solution or two, then post about the results. If the path seems promising, I’ll follow up with some additional content.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them here or address them to john@benedettitech.com.

Thanks for looking in!