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.

Moving on to the second example

The second example in the 5 minute getting started guide is an example for reading the suggestions from a suggestions list on google page. Type in any word there and voila it shows a list with suggestions on what you really "might be/are" seatching for.

This trick of pulling out that list is a neat webdriver trick.

The example it self is easy to convert to ruby, just copy the old one and remove the "puts driver.title" then add the new code. The ugly thing about it is that busy loop to wait for the suggestion list to appear, but we'll ignore that for now.

The ruby:fied code with added "catch all" exception handling to ensure that it closes the browser if possible. Note that you can replace firefox with e.g. ie or chrome if you like.

require "selenium-webdriver"

begin
  driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :firefox
  driver.navigate.to "http://google.com"

  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

  #write em out
  list = driver.find_elements(:xpath, "//td[@class='gac_c']") 
  list.each do |ele|
    puts ele.text
  end

rescue
  puts $!, $@
end

driver.quit

The trick here was to find the ruby bindings equivalent for driver.findElement(By.className("gac_m")), driver.findElements(By.xpath("//td[@class='gac_c']")) and getText(). Quick search of the excellent (but devoid of examples) API documentation for the Ruby bindings turned out the correct answer. The answer was to use driver.find_element(:class_name, "gac_m"), driver.find_elements(:xpath, "//td[@class='gac_c']") and text.

When you run this it will reward you with a printout in the console with all the different suggestions for "cheese" weee! Cheesecake here we come!

Note that unless you are in Sweden you will get a different list then me, evil redirects ... :/

C:\Projects\selenium2_test>ruby googlesuggest_test.rb
cheesecake
cheesecake recept
cheese
cheesecake hallon
cheesecake fryst
cheesecake factory
cheesecake citron
cheesecake i glas
cheesecake passionsfrukt
cheesecake vit choklad


Next post will be about making it build server ready, we trolls love automation and will be adding Rspec, Rake and Ci_reporter stuff to this to get it to check if cheesecake is indeed one of the suggestions by Google.

p.s.
What frustrated me in the beginning was that the "meat" in the documentation is accessible thru the 3 boxes in the top right (class list, method list and file list). d.s.

Getting started with Selenium 2.0 and Ruby

Since my previous post about this was a bit trollish, I decided to redo it.
selenium-webdriver with ruby 1.86+ should work out of the box. But with ruby 1.9x and windows you might need too do some tiny troll magic.

Resources:
Ruby installers, 
Selenium-Webdriver Ruby Bindings
How to fix the msvcrt-ruby18.dll Ruby 1.9 problem

Installing Ruby
If you haven't installed ruby yet, you will need to do so. Head over to http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/ and grab the one you prefer (I used ruby 1.91). Install it.

Installing the selenium-webdriver gem
After that we need to install the selenium-webdriver gem. Fire up a cmd/terminal. Some systems might force you to do this as an administrator, see Howto start cmd as an Administrator.
On OSX make sure to use sudo, note that you need administration privileges to be able to use sudo.

Windows: gem install selenium-webdriver
OSX and other sudo thingamajig: sudo gem install selenium-webdriver


Try the example:
Now if you want you can try the example at the RubyBindings page.
If this works now, you don't need to do anything more! If you get a popup about msvcrt-ruby18.dll then you need to read on.


Fixing the "msvcrt-ruby18.dll missing" problem:
Windows and Ruby 1.9 only
The problem is in the win32-api dependency, (one of the gems installed). The solution is outlined here.
What you need to do is to rebuild that gem locally, to do that you need to install the devkit from rubyinstaller.org.

Download the devkit at the Rubyinstaller.org download page.
Unpack it into you ruby installation root directory (for me it was C:\Ruby191)

Run the commands detailed in the fix post.
gem uninstall win32-api 
and  then
gem install win32-api --platform=ruby

This should be it, your example should run fine now.

Next post:
Next post will be about "rubyfying" example 2 in the 5 minute getting started guide for Selenium 2.0