Handle Ajax with Selenium RC

Lately I have been adding improvements to the framework that I have build using selenium rc, JUnit, Java, and Xpath. While adding more functions I wanted to add a method to handle ajax. The idea was to wait until all the ajax action complete in a page. Selenium api has a waitForCondition method. Method accept a script, and time out.

Our application uses Prototype ajax library. so I used

from selenium api, and implement the following method.

I have added

file to handle all the server settings and timings related to our test automation framework. In above method timing is invoked from that properties file.

Java File System Api getting a make over

I was just reading upcoming changes in Java 7, and I was very excited. One thing I found out that java.io.File getting a make over.

Here are the things that going to be added to the Java 7 release,

• FileRef – represents file object in system
• Path – extends FileRef, binds a file to a system-dependent location
• FileSystem – interface to file system FileStore – underlying storage system

I am planning to put a post once I find an example using the new api.

ZFS now has built-in deduplication, & ZFS available on Snow Leopard

I was doing my regular daily doze of technical reading and stumble upon Jeff Bonwick’s blog. Sounds like deduplication is a great concept. I think this might be very helpful reducing the size of the repositories. But more than any thing I was thrilled about his previous post. ZFS is available on Snow Leopard. Wow!!!, as you may know from my previous posts, I switch to mac just about a month ago. And I must say somehow my mac book pro able fascinate me in daily basis. And this was another example.

Best use of ThreadLocal class to handle Selenium Session

Dealing with threads in Java is not the easiest but I was in the process of implementing a custom Java Selenium Framework and I decided “Why not use the help of the ThreadLocal class to ease my pain”. So, this is my attempt to take stab at ThreadLocal class.

Why Did I need to use the ThreadLocal class?

Only thing you need to know about my implementation.
As I mentioned, I have created class that extends DefualtSelenium.java (lets call it OurDefaultSelenium.java, this class has method that start the selenium session)

So, just because I think I should use the ThreadLocal class does it mean is it the best mechanism to use..?

Most typical scenario of using ThreadLocal would be as an alternative to an object or resource pool, when we don’t mind creating one object per thread.

So When should I really use the Thread Local

Ok enough of lecturing, lets get to the bottom of it, shall we.

Lets call our Class, SeleniumSession make sense right we are dealing with selenium session.

Note that there is still a single, static instance of SeleniumSession shared by all threads. But that single instance uses the ThreadLocal variable session, which has a per-thread value. Inside get(), the call to selenium.get()  will always operate on our thread-private “instance” of the variable, with synchronization.

Since we are using Java generics, subsequent get() method doesn’t need an explicit cast. (That is, the cast is inserted automatically by the compiler.)

But lets focus our eyes on to

method. We actually subclass ThreadLocal and override

to provide an appropriate object each time a new one is required (i.e. when

is called for the first time on a particular thread). I know what you thinking, You could add a logic to check the null inside the

method. Like this,

    OurDefaultSelenium ourSelenium = session.get();
    if (ourSelenium == null) {
      session.set(cal = new DefaultSelenium());
    }
    return ourSelenium;

In this implementation I also have methods to set the session and end the selenium session.

Data Driven Selenium Test

Over the past year or two Selenium has taken over many developers hearts. Let me put it in this way, It won most of the Java developers hearts simply because if you are a java developer using Selenium now you can write a test without learning a new language nor using another stupid application developed by HP or any other 3rd party software company.

But some criticize saying that Selenium can not do Data Driven testing. I think its a bogus statement. Prior to this implementation I have used Selenium but I never had the oppertunitity to explore how I can used Dynamic data from csv file to execute in a selenium test.

In my development I decided to use csv file as the input but it doesn’t have to be csv file, I am more comfortable on dealing CSV Files with Java than any other file type so I picked CSV. My target is to create a Selenium Test that takes Username and Password from CSV file and login to web application. Its better you separate Selenium Test to one class and reading data from csv to another class. If you building as a framework I recommend to package is separate. Lets say we have a class call ReadInData.java and my file looks like this,

CSV File with Username & Password

lets write few methods to parse this data. Keep in mind that we need to use this data in the test and any method that does the manipulation should return an Array, a Map, or List with user name and password.I decided to use a HashMap implementation and return a HashMap with username and password.

Use XPath to get respective text boxes and create a simple method as shown below, keep in mind that I am returning an instance of the class. Developers have mix feelings about the chain effect. But here I have used simply because I was planning on developing a framework and who ever use this framework to generate selenium test will have a very easy time on putting a test together with the help of the chain effect.

<a rel="attachment wp-att-304" href="http://anublog.colombounplug.com/?attachment_id=304"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-304" title="MultiUser" src="http://anublog.colombounplug.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/MultiUser.jpg" alt="MultiUser" width="1114" height="398" /></a>
<a rel="attachment wp-att-305" href="http://anublog.colombounplug.com/?attachment_id=305"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-305" title="SingleUser" src="http://anublog.colombounplug.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/SingleUser.jpg" alt="SingleUser" width="788" height="286" /></a>

So, This clearly shows that Selenium Test can be data driven and its all in the person’s hand who is writing the test. Enjoy!

Pulling my hair out on FB Data Extraction

I am trying it put together java base data extraction module for Facebook data. I am doing this to get large enough data set for my data mining project. I am thankful for all the developers who are trying to keep up the java-facebook-api upto date, but I had enormous amount of issues with facebook-java-api. Including my other research work this is the latest enemy of sleep. So, to give you an idea, for the last four days my total number of sleep hours are in single digit.

GWT complains on @override

I recently update my java version to build 11 and first thing I found out that GWT SDK doesn’t have the latest addition from java build to reflect @override.

If you are like me who use eclipse, when you create a method like this.

Eclipse will automatically will add @override which help the compiler to understand the behavior of the method. This is a addition in java 1.6 build 11, But GWT SDK doesn’t have this update so your compiler will cough on you.