selenium quickstart tips

By using Selenium (http://www.seleniumhq.org/), you can automate browsers and it is a good practice to use the tool to do some integration testing.. There are many tutorials about this on the web, the following worked for me:

• Selenium IDE Demo - Quick Beginner's Tutorial  mentions the Firefox plugin which records and plays tests. Selenium IDE is useful, you can easily save and replay tests as html files, but i want my tests written in java and want to run them as junit tests.
• The following three videos by Absoft Training  are great!!
• Selenium Tutorial - Starting with Selenium WebDriver – Part 1 mentions WebDriver interface and illustrates to write basic test in java. It also shows how to use it for cross browser testing.
• Selenium Tutorial - Starting with Selenium WebDriver – Part 2 explains WebElement in detail and shows how to locate an element on the web page.
• Using XPath to Locate Web Elements - in very detail shows how to locate an element by xpath.

Absoft Training presents more tutorials here: http://www.absofttrainings.com/selenium-training-free-videos/ 

My usage tips :

• Download Selenium standalone server and the java client.
• In Eclipse create a java project and add the downloaded jars (must be 2 jars) to classpath.
• Download Selenium IDE and install it as Firefox plugin.
• Run the server and deploy your application to test.
• Open Firefox, start Selenium IDE, press record button and enter your web application url.
• Test your application, one use case at a time.
• Close Selenium recording, save it and export test case as Java / Junit 4/ WebDriver.
• I did not use the immediately exported files. But, i got help from them. I think preparing a utility file which enables you to switch between browser types, between development and production environments is convenient. If you have a complicated web page, it is good practice to write find methods for web elements and reuse them.
• Then run tests as junit.

Some technical tips:

• WebDriver interface provides many methods including findElement(), getTitle(), close(), getCurrentUrl() etc. It is good to examine its javadoc.
• You can locate a web element by id, name or xpath.
• To create Firefox driver, simply :
• WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
• To create Chrome driver, download the third party executable
• System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "path_to_executable");
• WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
• To create IE driver, download the third party executable
• System.setProperty("webdriver.ie.driver", "path_to_executable");
• WebDriver driver = new InternetExplorerDriver();
• To make same arrangements:
• driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(60, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
• driver.manage().window().maximize(); // maximizes opening browser
• Selenium sees everything on a web page as web element.
• findElement retrieves first one that matches
• findElements retrieves all elements that match
• You can locate by
• Id
• Name
• LinkText (text of hyperlink)
• PartialLinkText
• Xpath (ultimate solution, when others don't work)
• ByXpath("//input[@placeholder='Email']") means locate an input field whose placeholder attribute value is Email.
• CssSelector
• TagName
• ClassName
• Locating by Xpath
• Xpath-Absolute: not recommended.
• //html/body/tag1[index]/..
• Xpath-Attributes: best when can't use id or name
• //input[@id='Pass' and @placeholder='Password']
• //input[contains(@id, 'user')] 
• //input[starts-with(@id, 'user')] 
• Selenium IDE and Firefox developer tools can help to get the xpath of the element.
• Xpath-Relative: best for table cells
• //table[@id='xtable']/tbody/tr[3]/td[2]
• You can make Selenium to wait for the presence of some element:
• final WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 60);
• wait.until(ExpectedConditions.presenceOfElementLocated(By.id("the_id")));

A test case template:

// create driver for the browser you want
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

//open homepage
driver.get("the_url");

//find related field, enter some value
driver.findElement(By.[id|name|xpath]("the_value")).[clear()|click()|sendKeys("..")];

//find command button and click
driver.findElement(By.id("the_id")).click();

//assert results

mockito with testng suite

When writing tests by mocking your objects, you have to call a method in order to make sure your @Mock annotations really work. This method call is as follows:

 MockitoAnnotations.initMocks(this);  

In general, we use a BaseTest and call the method there and extend our tests from that BaseTest. Thus, the tests succeed when you run them separately. However, when you call them as suite, you may get the folowing error:

 testClass cannot be null. For info how to use @Mock annotations see examples in javadoc for MockitoAnnotations class  

I tried several approaches to fix this including using MockitoTestNGListener.class, none of which work. Then i find an article advising not to use inheritance in tests (http://www.petrikainulainen.net/programming/unit-testing/3-reasons-why-we-should-not-use-inheritance-in-our-tests/), removing inheritance and calling MockitoAnnotations.initMocks(this);  inside every test class worked :)