Object identification is a very crucial part of any automation
effort irrespective of the automation tool we may use like QTP, selenium or any
other. For every automation engineer, It is very important to identify the
objects used in the automation effort effectively.
Object identification, to be more precise, objects
being identified accurately demands certain steps to be followed and is
certainly not a straight forward experience in Selenium RC or Selenium
WebDriver.
Selenium WebDriver offers a range of locators to capture
a specific object in AUT, like – ID, Name, Xpath, CSS, etc. Most of the times,
user has to make use of Selenium IDE, Firebug or Firepath to identify the objects.
There are few limitations with the traditional approach:
§ User wants to verify text without triggering an event on the
application (like Click)
§ Selenium-IDE frequently generates index-based Xpath, which is not
the right approach as maintainability becomes an issue
§ Selenium -IDE locators work only on single HTML reference at a
time. Whereas web technology allows nested HTML structure with frames. If you
want your Selenium WebDriver to act on an object which belongs to frame/iframe,
you must select the frame first.
There are some tools such as Firebug and Firepath that
can provide a much deeper understanding of the objects. The drawback here is
that it demands understanding of HTML DOM to help you decide how to deal with
objects to derive the best object identification locator.
Identifying Objects is
Selenium (WebDriver) is pretty simple if you are working on an application
built on Firefox, but it gets very tricky if you are working on IE application.
So it would be best to master the object identification techniques.
If you have used the Selenium IDE for any recording you would have
noticed that there are multiple ways of identifying an object. By default the
Selenium IDE tries to recognize the object by the ID or name attribute. Selenium
IDE identifies the objects by the attributes mentioned in the order below:
§ ID
§ Name
§ Link Text
§ CSS Selector
◦
Based on Combination
of HTML tag, id, class, and attributes
◦
Tag and ID (e.g.,
css=a#test)
◦
Tag and Class (e.g.,
css=a.test)
- Tag and Attribute (e.g., css=input[name=lastName])
§ Xpath – Attributes
§ Xpath – Relative
§ Xpath – Absolute or Position
§ DOM
◦
getElementById
◦
getElementsByName
◦
dom:name
◦
dom:index
Example: When
we are identifying a search text box, we can locate the object using different
locators as shown below.
When
we record a simple step of clicking on the “Google Search” button on the home
page. If you can convert the recorded test step to Java – JUnit 4 – WebDriver
(Options -> Format -> JUnit 4 – WebDriver). The code for clicking the
“Google Search” button using ID attribute would look like this -
driver.findElement(By.id("gbqfb")).click();
for name
driver.findElement(By.name("btnG")).click();
for cssSelector
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("#gbqfb")).click();
for Xpath Attributes
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//button[@id='gbqfb']")).click();
for Xpath Relative
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[@id='gbqfbw']/button")).click();
for Xpath Position / Absolute
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//button")).click();
If you prefer not to use Selenium IDE you can use
Firebug or Firepath to identify the objects
Firebug:
Example: Identifying a object
locator using Firebug
Firepath:
Example: Identifying a object
locator using Firepath
Object Maintenance:
How do we manage objects in the repository efficiently
so that we can adapt any change in future in a very efficient manner?
Applications go through constant change with the
additional of new screens / objects or changes to the existing. We must know
which objects are already present in the repository and which objects in AUT
have undergone a change and require update in Object Repository. Many are lost
in this phase, ending up with relearning the objects / making changes to object
without knowing the impacted test cases. As a result you have to maintain
duplicate objects or notice unnecessary failures during execution.
As mentioned earlier, the first step to help with
Object Maintenance is Object Identification. Smarter object identification
helps ensure that you only have to deal with object maintenance, if an object
has truly undergone a change.
An automation tool
that can help you understand the impact of any object change, like “the list of
test cases impacted by an object change” will save lot of maintenance time. Unfortunately,
most of the available automation tools identify the change in application only
after a failure has occurred during execution!
Impact of Object
Management on Automation ROI
Object management that looks beyond the basics of
object identification will have a much larger impact on ROI from a test
automation exercise. Incomplete and under-utilized Object Management will have
adverse consequences such as:
§ Productivity slows down
§ Maintenance efforts increase
§ Overall cost is increased as against anticipated savings
§ Above all, readiness of automation suite is not guaranteed when
required
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