One of the most common ways of interacting with a page displayed in a browser, in Selenium tests, is clicking on a WebElement. But many times, due to the timing when the click happens, it will fail, since the WebElement that needs to be clicked is not yet available. This might be because some Javascript events have not finished enabling that WebElement, or other similar issues. Making clicks reliable can be done by using WebDriverWait, to wait until the click can actually happen.
In this post i will discuss the methods you can find in thewaiter library, for waiting for a page to load completely. I will show the methods you can use from thewaiter that can help you with these waits, and some test examples for each, that you can also find in GitHub. Continue reading thewaiter: opening a page and waiting for it to load with Selenium→
During my talk at the recent SauceCon conference, i described how you can write reliable Selenium tests by using WebDriverWait based methods to wait for page events to take place. I am now happy to announce that my little project, thewaiter library that i mentioned in the talk, is available to use from the Maven Repository! Read on for details. Continue reading Introducing thewaiter. A WebDriverWait based library for writing reliable Selenium tests→
You are writing some automated tests with Selenium, that require you to fill in some text fields in a form. You are pretty confident you typed the values you expected to type, into the field you expected to type into. But, here are just 3 reasons why you should write some code that checks that you actually wrote what you thought, where you thought, before submitting the form you are trying to fill in.
Let’s say you have a task to check whether a certain image is broken on your page. In case of a broken image, instead of it being rendered properly on the page in your browser, you will see a suggestive icon, like an X or something similar (depending on the browser), suggesting that it’s broken. Continue reading Checking whether an image is broken with HttpClient→
Where does this approach apply? One of the following:
if you have a list of elements with identical selectors. The element you are interested in is an element of that list. But it does not always appear in the same place in the list. Sometimes it might be the third element in the list, other times it might be the second, or the fourth, and so on. You only know that using getText() on the element returns a known text.
if the element you are searching for has a different selector each time you open the page. You know only the type of element it is (whether it is a button, or an a element representing a link, or an img element) and what text should be displayed on that element.
if the element you are looking for does not even have any attached attributes. That means it is only a tag, without an id or class, or anything else except for the tag name (tag being ‘a’ for links, ‘img’ for images, and so on). You know what getText() should return when applied to that element.
This is going to be a rather complex post, that will show how to easily check for values of similar UI elements. By similar i mean elements that share some kind of properties: whether they have the same CSS selector, or are part of the same group of elements. Some examples will be shown below. Performing the testing part will imply the use of @FindBy (of Selenium WebDriver) and List (of Java). Read on to get an idea of where this approach can be used, how @FindBy is ideal for such a task, what the basics of working with List are, and what an actual test looks like. Continue reading @FindBy, Lists and using them to check for similar UI elements→
