Watir and Javascript

I am looking into multiple web testing tools. I am trying watir now. My main concern is dealing with javascript. I just want to know if anyone can give me an overview on dealing with javascript in watir. What are some of the pitfalls and difficulties with it? Is it basically using javascript injections to tell the page what to do?

And if someone wants to suggest other web testing tools like watir I would appreciate it. I tried selenium first and found it to be a tad unreliable.

Are there an开发者_如何学Goy cheap tools on the market?

Thank You!

Watir + Javascript => generally it's possible to inject javascript into your tests e.g.

@b.goto("javascript:openWin(2)")

When you say 'dealing with javascript' I assume you mean how well does Watir handle client side code in terms of rendering/execution. Since Watir drives real browsers (like Selenium) then JS will execute generally as expected.

Watir has different many different drivers, e.g. watir, firewatir, safariwatir, chromewatir, operawatir and now watir-webdriver. All of them drive the browser in slightly different implementations depending on the browser and OS. Firewatir for example uses JSSH which is in effect controlling the browser via JS. Can you explain what you mean by Selenium being 'unreliable'?

I'd recommend looking at the latest implementation of watir-webdriver. That way you get the benefit of a nice watir API on top of a new driver implementation. Webdriver has some strong backing in terms of support (Selenium 2 uses it, Google is coding it!) so I reckon it's a safe bet. You can also control most of the major browsers with this implementation.

Alternative tools => http://wiki.openqa.org/display/WTR/Alternative+Tools+For+Web+Testing

Tim provides a pretty good answer.

The only thing I have to add to what he said is that I've found that now and then I have to use the watir methods to fire specific javascript events such as onmouseover in order to accurately simulate the user interacting with the page. Since watir has a method for this, the hard part is not the watir code, but reverse engineering the page (or noticing subtle page interactions based on user actions) to figure out what elements are 'wired' up to what events and the order to fire those events against those specific elements.

Usually it's pretty easy to look at the HTML for an element and see what's going on. But with some custom controls it can take a bit of learning because they manage to do a pretty good job of 'hiding' all the event wiring, and you may have to parse through various aspects of the page (styles and all) using something like fiddler.

(after all, the normal user will never 'force' javacript to execute, or 'inject' javascript. They will use the mouse and keyboard to interact with the page, and any javascript is going to be a result of scripts that execute when the page is loaded, or as a result of scripts triggered via events based on specific user actions)

If your JS does not trigger a HTML refresh then WATiR will get confused. When you click an object in WATiR it waits for the page to load before continuing. You can overcome this with custom waiting commands and use of '.click!'.

If you are a reasonable ruby coder then WATiR is a solution for most things. It has the potential to be a rather stable and reliable source of automated web testing.

You may want to look into Firewatir, sahi, watir-webdriver, just to give you some more leads (would suggest googling for "open source web testing" and the like if you haven't. I looked into these and many more and settled on WATiR for reasons of cost, power, flexibility and prior knowledge (in ruby and WATiR). With the right gems it will speak to most databases and to Excel (or other file) to load test data.

I'm currently using WATiR to test a ZK-generated interface where none of the IDs are ever static and there's a lot of AJAXiness going on. I just built a framework to deal with these, and it works just fine.

Also, some semi-true and true things that may help.

To pass javascript from watir use browser.execute_script() Example:

Watir::Wait.until { $browser.execute_script("return document.readyState") == "complete" }