Selenium proved a bit more difficult mainly due to my development environment…

Problem 1

I have VirtualBox setup running ColdFusion, Apache and MySQL.   Using a shared directory I have Apache pointing at my Eclipse workspace which lives on my ‘host’.

Setting up a very simple Selenium test using the new CFSelenium, I just wanted to see if I could get a browser window to pop open…

selenium = new selenium("http://www.google.com/", "localhost", 4444, "*googlechrome");
selenium.start();
selenium.open("/");

This failed with a “The Response of the Selenium RC is invalid: Connection Failure ” error.

The issue is the “localhost” in the Selenium setup.  The test, running on my guest VM can’t communicate with the Selenium RC server running on my host.

What I needed to do was direct things to my host IP which is 192.168.2.2…

selenium = new selenium("http://www.google.com/", "192.168.2.2", 4444, "*googlechrome");

This correctly kicked off a Google Chrome.  But what about Firefox?

Problem 2

Trying to run tests in Firefox introduced another issue:

The Response of the Selenium RC is invalid: Failed to start new browser session: java.lang.RuntimeException: Firefox 3 could not be found in the path! Please add the directory containing ”firefox.exe” to your PATH environment variable, or explicitly specify a path to Firefox 3 like this: *firefox3c:\blah\firefox.exe

I tried explicitly defining the path, using the example from the error, as well as adding my Firefox directory to the path.

selenium = new selenium("http://www.google.com/", "192.168.2.2", 4444, "*firefox3C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe");

No luck.  After a bit of Googling it turns out the correct syntax is:

selenium = new selenium("http://www.google.com/", "192.168.2.2", 4444, "*firefox C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe");

Notice the space between “*firefox” and the path. That is important. :)

Now things work!

It seems like you could easily configure a powerful testing environment by simply loading up several VMs with various flavors of operating systems and browsers and then pointing one set of tests at them all.

1. VM 1 = Windows XP with old flavors of IE and Firefox
2. VM 2 = Windows 7 with IE9, Chrome and Firefox 4
3. Linux, etc…

I cranked up Selenium IDE and recorded myself manually deleting a page or two.  Looking at the resulting HTML test code I started hacking.

I had a list of all the spam pages via the Index page from Trac.  I cleaned that up into a comma delimited list.  Than I hacked up a short ColdFusion script to loop through the list and write out some HTML following the format of the Selenium test:

<tr> <!-- click spam link -->
<td>clickAndWait</td>
<td>link=401_buy_oxytrol
</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr> <!-- click delete page button on spam page -->
<td>clickAndWait</td>
<td>//input[@value='Delete page']</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr> <!-- click confirmation delete button -->
<td>clickAndWait</td>
<td>//input[@value='Delete page']</td>
<td></td>
</tr>

In hindsight I could have probably hacked my CF loop directly into my Selenium script and saved (and run) it as a .cfm.

I had well over 100 spam links to delete. I fired off the revised Selenium script in Selenium IDE and set on a medium speed (I didn’t want anything to timeout) and it chugged through these in a minute or two.

Done!   Probably not an intended use for Selenium but it worked and saved me a huge amount of manual labor.

• Changelog is here.
• Release notes here.

One big one I see – Firefox 3 support! :)

Cubic – from the same folks that make Selenium

CubicTest is a graphical Eclipse plug-in for writing Selenium and Watir tests. It makes web tests faster and easier to write, and provides abstractions to make tests more robust and reusable.

CoScripter – IBM(?)

CoScripter is a system for recording, automating, and sharing processes performed in a web browser such as printing photos online, requesting a vacation hold for postal mail, or checking flight arrival times. Instructions for processes are recorded and stored in easy-to-read text here on the CoScripter web site, so anyone can make use of them.

• Selenium Core
• Selenium RC
• Selenium IDE

Update: Took me a bit to find the Core download – here is a link to the .zip

Ajax support also seems MUCH improved in Selenium IDE. I have a form with some jQuery autocomplete fields that I have been struggling to make work and just got it working with the new Selenium IDE with minimal tweaking!

Update Part II: Selenium IDE has a new look (see below). Also it appears there are a LOT more commands available. I was trying to get a script running with Ant and it was failing because it was running to fast. Within the IDE and the Testrunner – you can manually adjust the speed. After a bit of digging on the Selenium forums I discovered you can now do: setSpeed (value) within the IDE. This will set the speed the test runs at automatically.

One thing I liked is John had tagging built into his Ant scripts. He tags everything when his build file is run. I think I’m going to write up a ‘yes/no’ dialog so I can be prompted and skip it if I don’t want to create a tag. I’m also curious about using something like Cruise Control for continuous integration. I really want to learn more about how people implement that when developing web applications.

I’m also going to start using the SVNAnt task instead of calling exec. The syntax looks MUCH cleaner.

The CFMeetup Link to John’s presentation: http://experts.acrobat.com/p41566907/

I have Selenium IDE installed within Firefox to record tests and I’m tinkering with different ways of setting up Selenium Core to run test suites locally. Our projects are stored in SVN and I want to store the test scripts there as well. I’m thinking I can store the scripts in a /testing directory and then include them within the webroot of my project on checkout using the svn:externals property.

If you use Selenium – how do you have it setup and configured? Do you use the Core or just Selenium IDE to run your tests?

Where: PStrat

What: An introduction to using Selenium to test your web applications. Also – a recap of my previous Ant presentation. All hastily put together this weekend while my kids threw Lego’s at me…

Come on out and hang with your fellow Triangle ColdFusion geeks and watch me fuddle through another presentation!! We both might learn something!

More info at the TACFUG site!

I’ll be showing how to setup and use Selenium and the Selenium IDE to create and run tests, and I’ll be giving a brief version of my previous Ant presentation (maybe combining Ant and Selenium!) as well for those who missed that.

If you haven’t checked out a TACFUG meeting in awhile I encourage you to come!!

After a quick download and install:

Molybdenum is based on Selenium and enhances it with direct browser integration and a visual editor. At the same time it removes the need to deploy testscripts on the server to be tested.

It is a Firefox extension and appears to be very similar to Selenium IDE allowing you to record tests. Reading the help it seems like you can also use Molybdenum to start and run tests and maybe create reports. There is even a brief mention of using Ant.

I’m curious if anyone has heard of this or used it? I’ll post more as I work through putting together my Selenium presentation.