felinium

Selenium for cats, or, Chad does not code while other people are watching. This was not designed without Chad speaking in the background.

Set-up

mkvirtualenv selenium
pip install -r requirements.txt
cd html
python -m SimpleHTTPServer 16981 > /dev/null 2>&1&
cd ..

Or you can leave SimpleHTTPServer running in anoher terminal tab.

Everyone's assignment for next meeting: Study Hasan's e2e tests legacy.

Quick Demo

Introducing what Selenium does. See ghostwriter.py.

Notes:

• driver.get waits until the moment the browser's onload event has fired. This is problematic if your page fetches data even after onload, say via AJAX. For this, you have to wait.
• What happens when an error occurs before driver.close()? How is that relevant for unit testing?

Links:

• Selenium Selectors

Arte Angular

Motivating question: Is our UI too fancy for Selenium? For instance, dealing with select elements is easy---see plain_select.py.

But we use ui-select2! What do? See uiselect2.py

Heart-attack pop quiz: How about file uploads? Keep in mind that, at least for candidate resume, the upload functionality is wrapped inside a profiler. (Bawal sumagot: Tim, Cassie).

What happens when the selector applies to more than one element? You can locate via CSS selectors but it is still not as flexible as jQuery. You could use XPath but it is messy. jQuery is the bestest!!!!111! See multielement.py.

How about links that open new tabs/windows, of which we have plenty?! See new_window.py. But, just by using the code we have now, this is prone to memory leaks.

Logging-in

(Source not included.)

There are two ways:

1. Log-in "like a real user" by loading the log-in page, selecting input boxes, and sending them your user credentials.
2. Setting the cookies for yourself.

Miscellaneous stuff that may come in useful

• As a real user, you can execute JavaScript in the browser's console. In Selenium, you can do the same via the driver's execute_async_script and execute_script methods.
• Selenium does not play well with unexpected browser dialogs (alerts, prompts, etc.).

Unit Testing

The code itself is easy

from selenium import webdriver
import unittest

class SeleniumTest(unittest.TestCase):
    
    def setUp(self):
        self.driver = webdriver.Firefox()

    def test_star(self):
        """
        In these tests, we usually just assert certain properties in the
        elements, or do a "happy path" run through a form. Then we are happy as
        long as there are no exceptions raised.
        """
        pass

    def tearDown(self):
        self.driver.quit()

But remember these tests will usually (should) be run in a server. Will it matter that the server is "headless"? Spoiler: the answer is "yes".