Test Automation Blog

XPather is a small Firefox extension, which I find indispensable (together with Firebug) when writing Selenium tests.

It adds a 'Show in Xpather...' item to the context menu for all the UI elements on the web page. When selected this option opens a small 'XPather Browser' window showing a very, very long XPath expression which selects the element you chose.

Like /html/body/table[2]/tbody/tr[2]/td[2]/div[@id='login']/form[@id='gaia_loginform']/div[@id='gaia_loginbox']/table/tbody/tr/td/div/table[@id='gaia_table']/tbody/tr[8]/td[2]/input, which is the expression you get when you select the 'Sign in' button on the login page of Gmail. Of course you can write your own expressions and test to see what is selected on  the page.  So you can opt to use for example //input[@name='signIn'], which is much shorter and better way to locate the same button. I use XPather mostly to interactively test complex expressions whenever I am trying to locate some hard-to-find object on the web page.

If the application you are testing tends to open new browser windows using the target="_blank" technique, you might have some problems with Selenium.

One of the reasons I find Selenium a great test automation tool for the web  is that it lets you easily run your test scripts on different browsers without too much effort. Most scripts will run smoothly on IE, Firefox and even on more exotic browsers like Safari, Opera and Chrome without needing browser-specific code or having to tweak the test for a particular browser.  One of the few areas where you are likely to face problems is the handling of pop-up windows.  If the application you are testing tends to open new browser windows using the target="_blank" technique, you might have some problems with Selenium. The standard .selectWindow() method provided by Selenium requires either a title of the pop-up window (which is often the same as the title of the main window) or a name or a variable name (which are both missing, when the window is opened using a target="_blank" link).

You will need a workaround to select such windows and unfortunately the workarounds do not always work the same for all browsers. The following code snippets might be useful if you run into the same problem. They are tested on the *chrome and *iehta Selenium modes (with Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3).

Here is how you can select the pop-up window which is opened after a target="_blank" link is clicked. This actually combines several hacks and workarounds, but works at the end (at least for me):

        //A hack to select unnamed pop-up windows
        if (browser.equals("*iehta")){
            //Find out if Selenium substituted the blank target...
            if (selenium.isElementPresent(
                       "//a[starts-with(@target,'selenium_blank')]")) {
                // ...and make it notice the new window on IE
                selenium.openWindow("", selenium.getAttribute(
                      "//a[starts-with(@target,'selenium_blank')]@target"));
            }
        }
        String [] winNames = selenium.getAllWindowNames();
        //the last one is the pop-up window we want
        selenium.waitForPopUp(winNames[winNames.length-1], timeout);
        selenium.selectWindow(winNames[winNames.length-1]);

And here is how you can go back to the main window after you finished working with the pop-up:

        String [] winTitles = selenium.getAllWindowTitles();
        selenium.selectWindow(winTitles[0]);

Recording does not work, even with IE

 I realized that I was not fair in my previous test,  as I used the last version of Firefox, which unfortunately is not officially supported by TestPartner. To give it a second chance, I decided to repeat the test with Internet Explorer.  I re-recorded the same scenario, but this time in IE and tried to replay it.

 I got a better result, but only slightly. The recorded script was able to log-in, but could not click the button to create a new mail:

The playback failed at step 12, where the tool tries to ‘Attach’ to an HTML frame, identified with ‘Name=c36gxk9p2bo3a’. Attaching to a UI control in TestPartner means simply declaring that the subsequent actions in the script will be executed within this control.  c36gxk9p2bo3a is a generated name which changes each time when you enter GMail.  This was the reason the script could not find the frame, when trying to replay.

 If I had to code this script by hand, I would omit this step altogether. Usually it is sufficient to only attach to the browser window and not to specific frames within it. Also, I would not locate the other controls by ID and screen coordinates as the recording did in steps 13 and 14. This will likely fail too, even if the problematic step 12 is fixed.