how_to_write_frontend_selenium_tests.md

#Frontend testing with Selenium WebDriver, Mocha, and Chai.

Selenium allows us to control a web browser via node. Here we'll use Selenium in combination with the testing framework Mocha to simulate user interactions with our webapp and generate reports.

##Helpful links:

https://www.npmjs.org/package/selenium-webdriver

https://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/WebDriverJs

http://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html

http://visionmedia.github.io/mocha

http://chaijs.com/

##Install

To get started go ahead and copy the starter directory /testexamples. It should have an example.test.js file, and the chromewebdriver.

Install mocha globally

npm install -g mocha

Install selenium locally

npm install selenium-webdriver

Great, now let's just make sure it's working. basic.test.js is just a node script, but we'll use mocha to run it. Mocha will handle the reporting.

mocha basic.test.js

Hopefully we saw some magic browser action, and 1 passing test in our termnial.

##Structure tests for complex web applications.

That was fun, but more than likely we'll need to more substantial tests.

Due to the asychronous nature of both the browser and node writing involved tests can get tricky when we have to wait for dom updates, and ajax calls and the like.