This release has been superseded – Please see http://grails.codehaus.org/Selenium+plugin for the latest release information.
I’m a big fan of Selenium – it lets me test my web applications easily, quickly, and inside the browser. Now I’ve created a Grails plugin to bring the efficiency of Selenium to Grails projects easily.
When you install this plugin, it will download the Selenium-Core distribution (currently version 0.8.3 – 1.5MB) and extract it into your grails application (into <grails project>/web-app/selenium/core). Now you simply create your Selenium tests – putting them in <grails project>/web-app/selenium/tests.
This plugin will automatically generate your test suite by listing all of the files in the selenium/tests directory. You can create tests as standard HTML as per the selenium documentation (and easily created using SeleniumIDE). Or, you can for-go the HTML for pipe delimited text files (*.psv) – this plugin will convert the pipe delimited files on the fly to HTML.
Once you have your tests in place, you can run them using the Selenium Test Runner – at http://localhost:8080/<CONTEXT_PATH>/selenium/core/TestRunner.html?test=..%2F..%2Fselenium/suite.
NOTE: Using Selenium-core means that selenium and your tests are part of your web application – if you do not want your tests packaged in your WAR when using ‘grails war’ you must add this to your applications Config.groovy:
grails.war.resources = {stagingDir ->
delete(dir: “$stagingDir/selenium”)
}This will remove the ’selenium’ directory from the war – removing selenium-core and your tests. The SeleniumController class files are still included in your war – I haven’t found a cleaner way to completely remove the plugin yet.
To test-drive this plugin, you can follow this procedure (here is a shell script which does the same):
grails create-app selenium-test
cd selenium-test
grails install-plugin http://www.javathinking.com/grails/grails-selenium-plugin/0.1/grails-selenium-0.1.zip
grails create-domain-class book
grails create-controller book
Now, modify the domain class and controller:
class Book {
String title
static constraints = {
title(unique:true)
}
}
class BookController {
def scaffold = Book
}
Now create the tests:
/web-app/selenium/tests/test1.html:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″>
<title>test1</title>
</head>
<body>
<table cellpadding=”1″ cellspacing=”1″ border=”1″>
<thead>
<tr><td colspan=”3″>test1</td></tr>
</thead><tbody>
<tr><td>open</td><td>/selenium-test/</td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td>clickAndWait</td><td>link=BookController</td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td>clickAndWait</td><td>link=New Book</td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td>type</td><td>title</td><td>book1</td></tr>
<tr> <td>clickAndWait</td> <td>//input[@value='Create']</td> <td></td></tr>
<tr> <td>clickAndWait</td> <td>link=Book List</td> <td></td></tr>
<tr> <td>verifyTextPresent</td> <td>book1</td> <td></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</body>
</html>
or alternatively as pipe delimited /web-app/selenium/tests/test2.psv:
open|/selenium-test
clickAndWait|link=BookController
clickAndWait|link=New Book
type|title|book2
clickAndWait|//input[@value='Create']
clickAndWait|link=Book List
verifyTextPresent|book2
Now run your application with grails run-app and point your browser to http://localhost:8080/selenium-test/selenium/core/TestRunner.html?test=..%2F..%2Fselenium/suite
At the top left, you’ll see your test suite – on the right, you’ll see the ‘execute tests’ where you can run the entire suite or just the selected test.
For more on Selenium, see:
- Overview
- Selenium-Core documentation
- Selenium reference (for information on test syntax)
- Selenium IDE (Firefox extension for recording tests)
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
This is fantastic, Paul! Have you considered being able to create test suites based on subdirectories in the ’selenium/tests/’ directory? For example, given ’selenium/tests/book’ and ’selenium/tests/author’, the plugin would create a ‘Book’ test suite, an ‘Author’ test suite, and then a ‘AllTests’ suite that included both Book and Author. I currently use this type of structure so I can run just a subset of tests while I’m working on a particular area, then run the entire suite as a regression when I’m done.
If you’re interested in contributions to the plugin I could help out with trying to get that to work. Thanks for the plugin!
Good! wouldn’t it be great to have a Selenium-DSL on GSPs that generate the test html for you?
Mike, subdirectories are definitely on the list of things to do. I just thought I’d release early. I’ll get it done tomorrow. Glad you like it!
Andres, sounds interesting, but would it make it any easier than the pipe delimited text files?
Fantastic. I was thinking about create a selenium plugin. Nice to have that I not the only one. Very, very congrats, Paul.
Kind Regards
Paul, I wasn’t aware of the pipe delimited format, which is a concise way of looking the testing scenario. I like it even it doesn’t read like a dsl.
Andres, the pipe delimited format is my own contribution – I’ve never been a fan of writing all that verbose html when its not really necessary – its just presentation detail.
I think I need a way to add variables into the equation though. Perhaps this is where a DSL would shine? Currently I am going to see if simply using a setup page to produce the runtime values – which get stored in javascript variables with the storeXXX commands – is enough.
I’ve released 0.2 which supports directories – see http://www.javathinking.com/?p=66
Unless I am using it wrong, I think support for .html files in directories is broken in 0.2. I added a directory /user under /tests/, then added a .psv file and it loaded that fine. When i added a .html file it tried to load it under /user\test.html (wrong slash.)
Thanks for reporting that – its a windows problem. Apologies for not testing on windows, I have limited time available.
This issue will be fixed in 0.3 out soon!
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