Month: November 2012

Extending Selenium with jQuery

Last week I wrote about combining Selenium and py.test and I promised to also talk about my function find_elements_by_jquery().

Selenium by default can find elements by id, CSS selector and XPath, but I often find I already know the query as a jQuery selector, and so frequently it’s easiest just to use that.

We start by overloading the Selenium webdriver. Since the webdriver is exposed through several classes (one per web browser), we do this in a particularly meta way.

from selenium.webdriver.remote.webdriver import WebElement
from selenium.common.exceptions import InvalidSelectorException

def MyWebDriver(base, **kwargs):
    return type('MyWebDriver', (_MyWebDriver, base), kwargs)

class _MyWebDriver(object):
    def create_web_element(self, element_id):
        return MyWebElement(self, element_id)

    def find_elements_by_jquery(self, jq):
        return self.execute_script('''return $('%s').get();''' % jq)

    def find_element_by_jquery(self, jq):
        elems = self.find_elements_by_jquery(jq)
        if len(elems) == 1:
            return elems[0]
        else:
            raise InvalidSelectorException(
                "jQuery selector returned %i elements, expected 1" % len(elems))

We then do a similar implementation for the webelement:

class MyWebElement(WebElement):
    def __repr__(self):
        """Return a pretty name for an element"""

        id = self.get_attribute('id')
        class_ = self.get_attribute('class')

        if len(id) > 0:
            return '#' + id
        elif len(class_) > 0:
            return '.'.join([self.tag_name] + class_.split(' '))
        else:
            return self.tag_name

    def find_elements_by_jquery(self, jq):
        return self.parent.execute_script(
            '''return $(arguments[0]).find('%s').get();''' % jq, self)

    def find_element_by_jquery(self, jq):
        elems = self.find_elements_by_jquery(jq)
        if len(elems) == 1:
            return elems[0]
        else:
            raise InvalidSelectorException(
                "jQuery selector returned %i elements, expected 1" % len(elems))

We can now pass in jQuery selectors for instance b.find_element_by_jquery('#region option:selected'). Or form.find_elements_by_jquery(':input'). It’s especially incredibly powerful when all of your DOM manipulation already works in terms of jQuery selectors.

As an added bonus, overloading the classes lets us add functionality like Firebug style element names (MyWebElement.__repr__) or wrap things like the Wait utility into the webdriver, e.g.

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait as Wait
from selenium.common.exceptions import TimeoutException

class FrontendError(Exception):
    pass

# class _MyWebDriver...
    def wait(self, event, timeout=10):
        try:
            Wait(self, timeout).until(event)
        except (TimeoutException, FrontendError) as e:
            # do we have an error dialog
            dialog = self.find_element_by_id('error-dialog')
            if dialog.is_displayed():
                content = dialog.find_element_by_id('error-dialog-content')
                raise FrontendError(content.text)
            else:
                raise e

Combining py.test and Selenium to test webapps

Recently I started adding unit and acceptance tests to a webapp using Selenium, integrated into the existing py.test framework that tests the backend code.

py.test fixtures make using Selenium, via its Python bindings, really straightforward. Here’s how I did it.

First I put all the Selenium related tests in a tests/selenium/ directory. I then created tests/selenium/conftest.py and wrote a fixture to allow tests to access a single instance of the webdriver for the entire session:

import pytest
from selenium import webdriver

browsers = {
    'firefox': webdriver.Firefox,
    'chrome': webdriver.Chrome,
}

@pytest.fixture(scope='session',
                params=browsers.keys())
def driver(request):
    if 'DISPLAY' not in os.environ:
        pytest.skip('Test requires display server (export DISPLAY)')

    b = browsers[request.param]()

    request.addfinalizer(lambda *args: b.quit())

    return b

Note that we’re able to parameterise the fixture so that it runs with multiple browsers. We then add a per-function fixture that sets up the session for an individual test:

@pytest.fixture
def b(driver, url):
    b = driver
    b.set_window_size(1200, 800)
    b.get(url)

    return b

A fixture can refer to other fixtures of more generic scope. So url is a fixture that accesses the optional --url property.

def pytest_addoption(parser):
    parser.addoption('--url', action='store',
                     default='http://localhost/portal/portal.html')

@pytest.fixture(scope='session')
def url(request):
    return request.config.option.url

These fixtures are available for all tests in that package. Tests have the form:

def test_badger(b):
    # test goes here

We can also create per-module fixtures, that optionally inherit our generic fixtures. Say for example we want to run a number of tests (e.g. for WCAG 2.0 compliance) on a number of parameterised instances of the set-up webapp. We might do this in test_wcag.py:

import pytest

@pytest.fixture(scope='module')
def wcag(driver, url):
    """
    Set up a single session for these tests.
    """

    b = driver
    b.set_window_size(1200, 800)
    b.get(url)

    # do stuff here with Selenium to set up webapp
    
    return b

We can now write tests ((find_elements_by_jquery() is a method I’ve added in an extension of Selenium’s webdriver, and is a topic for another post.)) in this module, e.g.

@pytest.mark.wcagF17
@pytest.mark.wcagF62
@pytest.mark.wcagF77
def test_unique_ids(wcag):
    """
    All ids in the document should be unique.
    """

    elems = wcag.find_elements_by_jquery('[id]')
    ids = map(lambda e: e.get_attribute('id'), elems)

    assert len(elems) >= 1 # sanity check
    assert util.unique(ids)

Again, we can parameterise this fixture to set up the webapp in a number of different ways. Note that we have to use driver as our fixture, not b. This is because we can only refer to fixtures more general in scope than the one we are writing.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia
This work by Danielle Madeley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia.