This post is not about parallel testing (with the intent to reduce tests execution time), nor about running tests in many different drivers. For those issues I recommend looking into Selenium Grid (you can start here) and Jenkins nodes.
I haven't seen many (any) implementation of tests where you control two browsers at the same time and my googling of the subject yielded no useful hints on the subject. I find this odd, with the ever increasing user interaction web apps have, how come there aren't more automators with needs for tests that require two users to talk to each other (for example) through two distinct browser windows?
Before we can even begin, there are few caveats, this won't work if you like the using the browser handing through "$browser" global variable on you test suite like many webdriver examples show you to. Personally I find that kind of usage is terrible to maintain, very inflexible and I'm biased against global variables - like Matz (Ruby's creator) said: "They are ugly, so don't use them".
For a long time I've been recommending people to have the browser handling done at the World level, I setup this example a while ago, it is a module that you add to your World and it takes care of browser handling in a more pretty way. If you use the browser method it will start your browser as needed, so you can close and not worry about the state of a global var and where it got initiated...
This is pretty and good, unfortunately having the browser at World level like this means we only have one browser handler.
My favorite pattern for Cucumber based test frameworks however (and yes, I am aware it escapes a bit the few suggestions found in good literature) is making the World as an instance of a class made especially for handling the application at hand. This has it's advantages and drawbacks - and I obviously think the drawbacks are negligible facing the advantages.
How does this help?
You can have a list of users, each user being an instance of "YourApp::User" having this class include the Browser module, this way every user has it's own browser - using Firefox default configuration on Watir won't have the cookies "bleed" into one another.
However this does create another problem into itself, it probably screws up with most screenshot-on-error handling. I have made a gist with a proper solution (well, at least works for what I need).
How it works:
Caveat: I haven't tried the multi-user thing with many browsers at once, for my needs this has only been done in FF, I'll probably give PhantomJS driver a try with this and see what happens, if you do try this with Chrome, IE, Safari or Opera drivers, please tell me how it went in the comments.
I am aware that this probably is probably a "Lisa Simpson" - answering a question no one asked.
Before we can even begin, there are few caveats, this won't work if you like the using the browser handing through "$browser" global variable on you test suite like many webdriver examples show you to. Personally I find that kind of usage is terrible to maintain, very inflexible and I'm biased against global variables - like Matz (Ruby's creator) said: "They are ugly, so don't use them".
For a long time I've been recommending people to have the browser handling done at the World level, I setup this example a while ago, it is a module that you add to your World and it takes care of browser handling in a more pretty way. If you use the browser method it will start your browser as needed, so you can close and not worry about the state of a global var and where it got initiated...
This is pretty and good, unfortunately having the browser at World level like this means we only have one browser handler.
My favorite pattern for Cucumber based test frameworks however (and yes, I am aware it escapes a bit the few suggestions found in good literature) is making the World as an instance of a class made especially for handling the application at hand. This has it's advantages and drawbacks - and I obviously think the drawbacks are negligible facing the advantages.
How does this help?
You can have a list of users, each user being an instance of "YourApp::User" having this class include the Browser module, this way every user has it's own browser - using Firefox default configuration on Watir won't have the cookies "bleed" into one another.
However this does create another problem into itself, it probably screws up with most screenshot-on-error handling. I have made a gist with a proper solution (well, at least works for what I need).
How it works:
- Use the method browse to pass a block which gives you the browser handler.
- The method browser is still available, but not so cool.
- The browsing is wrapped in a way that on error a screenshot in base64 format will be saved to a file.
- Why base64? Embedding images on Cucumber HTML report needs to have the image accessible through an http request for as long as you want the report accessible.
- Ok, why a file then? Just a way to create an image *somewhere* and have it available on hooks, it also makes the image available case something goes terrible wrong and you hook block doesn't fully run.
Caveat: I haven't tried the multi-user thing with many browsers at once, for my needs this has only been done in FF, I'll probably give PhantomJS driver a try with this and see what happens, if you do try this with Chrome, IE, Safari or Opera drivers, please tell me how it went in the comments.
I am aware that this probably is probably a "Lisa Simpson" - answering a question no one asked.
No comments:
Post a Comment