Filtering javascript XHR calls in selenium RC

I've got a mad problem with an application I test with Selenium RC

At the end of the page, several calls are made by a javascript script to an analytics webservice which takes literally minutes to respond

Selenium wait for these calls to end before going to the new page, though their response is unrelated to the good execution of the process Eventually, Selenium throws a TimeOut Exception (timeout is开发者_运维知识库 set to 4 minutes)

I'm using selenium-RC 1.0.1 along with Firefox 3.5.16

First ,what I can't do : - change the application (i have no control over it) - change my Firefox version (several production machines are involved, and I need this version) - using WebDriver/Selenium 2 (for the reason above)

I think that blocking javascript calls would be the thing to do, but I can't figure out How to do that. - I'm trying, with a selenium.runScript and a selenium.getEval to set the javascript variables to null, but it's too late when they're set - I'm using Gecko's Object.watch method to see when values are changed, but with no success

I would like to know if there is a way to filter content via Selenium before the Dom is created. I think it would be possible via a Firefox extension, but that would be the last thing I want to do

Or, perhaps it's possible to recognize all active XHR in the page and abort it

I'm open to a bunch of new ideas

Thanks for reading

Grooveek

Sorry to hear that changing the application isn't an option - when I ran into a similar situation (external analytics service called through ajax), I wrote a mock in JavaScript for the service and had the version of my application that I run unit tests against use the mock. (In that case it wasn't speed of page load we were worried about, it was junking up the analytics data with automated test runs) That allowed me to avoid hitting the external site, yet still verify in my selenium tests that I was calling the right calls in the analytics site's javascript library at the appropriate times.

What I would suggest for your case is that you write a small HTTP proxy (you may find this question's answers useful, though if I were doing it I'd do it in Perl or Python, because that's pretty fast to write) that takes requests headed out to the external site, and responds immediately with an empty document or whatever's appropriate in your situation. (but handling all requests not aimed at the analytics site normally)

In other words, don't try to prevent the javascript from executing directly or by filtering the DOM, but just intercept the slow external requests and respond quickly. I suggest this because intercepting an entire request is significantly easier than filtering content.

Then, when you start the selenium RC server, point it at your http proxy as the upstream proxy. Browsers started by the selenium server will use the RC server as their proxy, and it'll then filter everything through your proxy.

With this approach, you basically get to pretend that the external site is whatever you want.