Ruby, rspec 1.x and cygwin

One thing that has irritated me for a long time is the inability to run rspec tests in Cygwin without having to maintain dual environments. Keeping 2 parallel environments one for Windows and one for "Cygwin on Windows" is an exercise in futility. But finally I decided to "hack" it, not that i's really an hack.

Use => ruby "c:\Ruby191\bin\spec" item_spec.rb

Replace C:\Ruby191 with your ruby installation directory and ofc item_spec.rb with your spec file of choice.

For an even more easy way, put it as an alias in your .bash_profile, e.g.
alias rsp="ruby 'c:\Ruby191\bin\spec'"

Then you can use => rsp item_spec.rb

More detailed explanation:
in the bin directory there is an spec.bat, the mixture of Ruby for Windows and Cygwin has a problem with paths. So by running the command in the spec.bat file we circumvent that problem and voila everything works.

Addition: Regarding my environment. Due to restrictions with selenium grid and local factors I am using ruby 1.87 and 1.9.1, with rspec 1.2.8 and latest selenium-client (as of 2010-11).

RT: Mountains to Molehills: A Story of QA

is an excellent slideshow by Dave Haeffner.

Check it out => Mountains to Molehills: A Story of QA.

The trolls recipe for "Getting started with Selenium 2.0 and Ruby"

To tired today to post anything of use. Also it's launch day for Starcraft II, that is going to destroy my whole week!

Got some more exploration of Selenium 2.0 and Ruby lined up.
Also I really need to write a "short" post about Lean, Agile and the role of self-inspection. Some stuff I need to get of my shoulders there, best way is probably to rant some about it ;)

Posts so far in the series "The Trolls recipe for  'Getting started with Selenium 2.0 and Ruby'" a.k.a The mountain troll does Selenium 2:

1. Getting started with Selenium 2.0 and Ruby
2. Moving on to the second example
3. Adding automation to your Selenium 2.0 tests (Ruby)

/The tired troll

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.

The troll takes on selenium 2.0

EDIT: On checking the selenium-webdriver gem, it seems to include everything needed to drive the browsers. So step 2-4 is not really needed. But still, below is exactly how I did this yesterday.

Not that I really work with testing anymore, it still interest me. Well at least getting it more and more automated.
So getting Selenium 2.0 running on my windows laptop sounded like a good summer activity.

In fairness the people responsible for both Selenium 2.0 and selenium-webdriver (which is the ruby frontend, packaged as a ruby gem) did a fantastic job.

You need following installed to get it working:
Firefox (or else you can change the example code to use IE or Chrome etc.)
Ruby 1.9
(Selenium 2.0)
And a few more stuff detailed below.

1. I installed first ruby 1.8.7 and the ruby 1.9.1 from the one-click installers.
2. Then I went to the SeleniumHQ and specifically they're Webdriver page.
3. Downloaded the complete package (selenium-server-2.0a5.zip) from the downloads page.
4. Unpacked it and added that directory to the CLASSPATH environment variable (I used C:\selenium-2.0a5).
5. Fired up a cmd prompt and installed the selenium-webdriver gem (gem install selenium-webdriver).
6. Navigated to the ruby bindings webpage for the WebDriver API => http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/RubyBindings
7. Fired up gvim (feel free to use your favorite editor here!)
8. Copy and pasted they're first example and it failed horrible. (Note that on some systems you will need 'require "rubygems"', best is to always use it). Save as google_test.rb
9. Googled the problem "msvcrt-ruby18.dll selenium-webdriver", found a related watir problem => http://code.google.com/p/selenium/issues/detail?id=583
10. Installed the devkit from rubyinstaller.org, devkit is available for download on this page => http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/
11. unpacked the contents into my ruby 1.9 directory (I use C:\Ruby191)
12. fired up the cmd again and ran
    gem uninstall win32-api
    gem install win32-api --platform=ruby
    as detailed in the watir fix
13. Then "ruby google_test.rb" in the cmd and everything worked as intended!