RUBY-ON-RAILS

Commands for Acceptance Testing

In this second part of a three-part article series on acceptance testing with Ruby on Rails, you will learn the various commands that are performed during this process, and start your first acceptance test. This article is excerpted from chapter 11 of the book Practical Rails Projects, written by Eldon Alameda (Apress; ISBN: 1590597818).

Author Info:

By: Apress Publishing

Poor Best

Rating:

/ 1

July 29, 2010

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

**Table 11-4.** *Some Selenium Element Locators*
Name	Description
id=element id	Finds the element with the specified id attribute
name=element name	Finds the element with the specified name attribute
identifier=element id	Finds the element that has a matching id attribute; if no match is found, finds the element whose name attribute matches the specified id
dom=JavaScript expression	Finds the element using a JavaScript DOM expression; for example, document.forms['someForm'].someButton
xpath=XPath expression	Finds the element based on an XPath expression; for example, //a[@href='http://google.com']
link=text pattern	Finds the link that matches the specified pattern

Selenium Test Formats

Selenium acceptance tests can be written in various ways. The default is HTML format. Selenium on Rails also offers the Selenese and RSelenese formats.

HTML Format

Tests using this format are written as normal HTML documents that contain a table:

<table>
<tr>
    <td>open</td>
    <td>/</td>
    <td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
    <td>verifyTitle</td>
    <td>Home</td>
    <td></td>
</tr>
</table>

Selenium parses the table and executes the commands in the order they appear.

There is one downside to using HTML tables to write acceptance tests: they are difficult to maintain and write.

Note You can write dynamic tests by using RHTML templates containing ERB code. However, like HTML, these tests are hard to maintain and write.

Selenese Format

The Selenese format is the easiest to write and maintain. Acceptance tests written using this format contain a table where columns are separated by the pipe character:

|open|/help|
|assertTextPresent|The Forgotten Soldier| |goBack||

The only downside to the Selenese format is that the tests are static. This is why Selenium on Rails also supports the RSelenese format.

RSelenese Format

RSelenese scripts are written in Ruby and allow you to use the full power of the Ruby language, as shown in the following example:

setup :fixtures => :all
open '/'
assert_title 'Home'
(1..10).each {|i| open :controller => 'catalog', :action => 'list', :page => i }

The biggest benefit of using RSelenese is that it allows you to create dynamic tests.

Next: The First Acceptance Test >>