Adding automation to your Selenium 2.0 tests (Ruby)

When I started with this stuff, what I really missed were some simple examples with links to further reading. Hopefully this series of posts here at the Troll can fulfill that category.

Now to make the Google suggest test automation ready. To do that we add two of Ruby's most trusted and proven gems. RSpec and Rake, nowdays Rake is distributed with Ruby (1.9+). We will add a very simple Rakefile and RSpec up our test. And to be build server ready we will add ci_reporter to get those nifty junit compatible test reports that your build server loves.

Now this post is not supposed to be an lesson in RSpec or Rake, I warmly recommend http://rspec.info if you want to get started with RSpec. Rake is harder to find a real good "howto" page for, but a simple google search should get you started. For ci_reporter go to http://caldersphere.rubyforge.org/ci_reporter/.

If you haven't already have the required gems installed here are the commands:
gem install rspec
gem install ci_reporter
and ruby 1.8x only => gem install rake


The testcase
We want to be sure that there is cheesecake in the suggestion list. In addition to the we make two other checks:
1) That we are indeed on a google page (match/regexp example), and
2) that the suggestion list is displayed (no suggestions displayed => no cheesecake => sad troll)

So let's take our old trusty googlesuggest_test.rb and copy to googlesuggest_spec.rb  _spec.rb is the usual name convention for rspec test files. We will use this later in the rakefile.

The code
I have added short notes on important places in the code noted with (x) where x is a number.

require "rubygems"
# (1) Add spec as required
require "spec"
require "selenium-webdriver"

# (2) This is how a testsuite is described/started in
# rspec (required)
describe "find_cheesecake" do

  # (3) before actions are either berfore :all cases in the 
  # suite (ie run once) or :each (ie run once before each case)
  # Here we start up the browser
  before(:all) do
    @driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :firefox
  end

  # (4) Start of testcase the rspec way
  it "should be cheesecake" do
    @driver.navigate.to "http://google.com"
    # Did we arrive? 
    # (5) Check if the title of the page starts with "Google"
    @driver.title.should match(/^Google/)

    element = @driver.find_element(:name, 'q')
    element.send_keys "cheese"

    # wait 5 s or until form is loaded
    five_sec = (Time.now) + 5
    until five_sec < Time.now
      resultsDiv = @driver.find_element(:class_name, "gac_m")
      if resultsDiv.displayed?
        break
      end
    end
    # (6) We do not want to continue if the resultDiv
    # did not display
    resultsDiv.displayed?.should be_true

    list = @driver.find_elements(:xpath, "//td[@class='gac_c']")
    # We do love cheesecake and need it in the list
    # to be satisfied.

    # Do a find in the list for "cheesecake"
    res = list.find {|ele| ele.text == "cheesecake"}

    # (7) if no cheesecake was found, the result is "nil"
    # == sad troll
    res.should_not be_nil
  end

  # (8) "after" works like "before" but only after :)
  after(:all) do
    # ensure that the browser is shutdown
    @driver.quit
  end
end

RSpec assertions are usually done with .should, more information about them are available on the Spec::Matchers page.


Now we need to test this, start your favorite terminal and navigate to the correct directory and run

spec googlesuggest_spec.rb


if everything was OK you will get a result similar to this

C:\Projects\selenium2_test> spec googlesuggest_spec.rb
.

Finished in 9.750975 seconds

1 example, 0 failures

Adding a rakefile
Adding a quick rakefile is quite easy (if you know howto) further reading about spec tasks and rakefiles is availble on the web. Good starting places would be http://rake.rubyforge.org/ and http://rspec.info/documentation/tools/rake.html

We add ci_reporter to it as per http://caldersphere.rubyforge.org/ci_reporter/

require "rubygems"
require "rake"
require "spec/rake/spectask"
gem 'ci_reporter'
require 'ci/reporter/rake/rspec'

desc "Run all examples"
Spec::Rake::SpecTask.new('examples') do |t|
  t.spec_files = FileList['*_spec.rb']
  t.fail_on_error = false
end

As you can see in the "examples" task, we add all files in the directory which match "*_spec.rb". The task it self know how to run em.
Save as "Rakefile" and the run
rake examples
in your terminal window, output should be like this:

C:\Projects\selenium2_test> rake examples
(in C:/Projects/selenium2_test)
.

Finished in 8.532853 seconds

1 example, 0 failures

Now to run it with ci_reporter to get the unit test compatible report, run
rake ci:setup:rspec examples
and you shall be rewarded with an SPEC-find-cheesecake.xml test report file in the spec\reports sub-directory. ci_reporter will produce 1 xml file per test suite (those started with describe as you remember).


The last command is also the one you want your build server to run, then you point it to the reports directory for test results.