Thought Delimited

The easiest way to create a CFSelenium test case is to use the Selenium IDE plugin for Firefox to compose the test, then export the test using the export formatter Bob Silverberg included in the CFSelenium.ﾠ You end up with a test that can be run the test against Firefox but can be further customized to your needs.

Of course the beauty of CFSelenium is that it lets you run those tests against browsers other than Firefox, to conduct cross-browser testing.ﾠ But who wants to create multiple copies of the original tests, or edit the test files whenever you want to check them against another browser?

Not this guy.

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In my earlier blog post on how to install and run CFSelenium, my steps included directions on copying the .jar file for the Selenium-RC/Selenium Server application to an easily accessible location and then starting your CFSelenium testing session by executing that .jar file from the command line.

I'm happy to report that anyone using CFSelenium in conjunction with ColdFusion 8 or 9 can skip those particular steps.ﾠ Marc Esher (of MXUnit fame) recently contributed code to the CFSelenium project that enables CFSelenium to start the Selenium Server (if it's not already running) anytime you run a test, and stops the server once the test is complete.ﾠ This code is now part of the latest version of CFSelenium that can be download via the CFSelenium GitHub page.

Unfortunately, when I revised the tag-based, CF 7/8-friendly versions of the CFSelenium files to incorporate Marc's code and ran it against CF 7, I found that CF 7 apparently could not start and stop the Selenium Server via the new code.ﾠ So ColdFusion 7 users will still have to start Selenium Server from the command line, but otherwise CFSelenium still works in CF 7.

When you use Selenium IDE to play back the actions you've recorded on a web page (the clicks, the text input, etc.), you can control the waiting period between the execution of each command using the slider control on the left end of the tool bar:

With CFSelenium, the way that you control the time period between executions is with the setSpeed(string milliseconds) function.ﾠ Once you set the execution speed with this function, the time period between executions will remain set at that length until you use setSpeed again.ﾠ So you could set the speed once within the setUp() function of your MXUnit test case...

public void function setUp() {
    browserUrl = "http://local.test";
    selenium = new CFSelenium.selenium(browserUrl, "localhost", 4444, "*firefox");
    selenium.start();
    selenium.setTimeout(30000);
    selenium.setSpeed("1000");
}

ﾠ

...or you could alter the speed within a test case function...

public void function testFormValidation() {
    selenium.open("blah/index.cfm?event=addEditUser&userId=12");
    selenium.setSpeed("3000");
    //Now Selenium will wait 3 seconds between each of the following command statements
    selenium.type("firstName", "John");
    selenium.type("lastName", "White");
    //Setting the speed back down to 1 second
    selenium.setSpeed("1000");
    ....
}

ﾠ

Knowing how to change the speed in CFSelenium is crucial if you're testing any sort of operation that might take a second or two to update the page, like an AJAX call that populates a drop-down box:ﾠ if the next command in your test requires that drop-down box to be populated, but CFSelenium tries to run that command before the AJAX call completes, either your test will fail or you'll get an error message from Selenium.ﾠ The setSpeed function lets you slow down the execution speed so your AJAX calls have time to do their work before the next step in the test.

In addition to doing browser behavior testing, there are four functions in CFSelenium that you can use to capture screenshots.ﾠ The first two are:

captureScreenshotToString(): captures a shot of your current monitor display in .png format and returns the image data as a base-64 encoded string. **

captureScreenshot(string filename): captures a shot of your current monitor display in .png format and writes the image data to the filename passed in as the argument.ﾠ The filename parameter must be a full path ending in a filename, like "C:\Data\Screenshots\screenshot1.png." **

ﾠ

**These two functions work for all supported browsers, but because they take an image of the entire monitor screen, the browser window launched by *CFSelenium may be obscured by other windows on your monitor, and sometimes CFSelenium (or more specifically the Selenium Server) places the browser window in the lower half of the monitor, cutting off the view of the lower half of the window.

The other two screenshot functions capture only an image of the web page in the browser launched by CFSelenium, and they capture that page in its entirety: even if the page is long enough to scroll for several screens, all of that content will be captured.ﾠ While that can make for some very elongated images, it does capture all parts of the page.ﾠ But unlike the first two functions, these can only be used with certain browsers:

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When using CFSelenium to send Selenium commands to the Selenium Server, you start off by instantiating CFSelenium as an object.ﾠ If you're using the ColdFusion 9 version, you would instantiate it with a statement like this:

browserUrl= "http://www.cnn.com";
selenium = new CFSelenium.selenium(browserUrl);

ﾠ

If you're using the ColdFusion 7 or 8 version, you might instantiate it like so:

<cfset var browserUrl= "http://www.cnn.com" />
<cfset variables.selenium= CreateObject("component","CFSelenium.selenium_tags").init(browserUrl) />

ﾠ

In both cases, you're calling the init() function of the respective CFSelenium .cfc file. The init() function can take 4 arguments:

• browserURL: (required) the URL of the website (just the address to the webroot, not to any subfolders) you want to run the Selenium commands against.

• host: (optional) the IP address or hostname of the machine running the Selenium Server instance CFSelenium will be communicating with. The default value is "localhost"

• port: (optional) the port number used to communicate with the Selenium Server instance. The default is 4444.

• browserStartCommand: (optional) a string that tells Selenium which web browser on the machine running the Selenium Server instance to use. The default value is "*firefox"

By default, CFSelenium uses Firefox to conduct the browser tests (which makes sense because most of the time you'll use the Selenium IDE Firefox plugin to create your tests). In order to have CFSelenium run a test case through a different browser, you'll have to pass a different browserStartCommand string into the init() function.ﾠ You can see a list of the different browserStartCommand strings in this post on StackOveflow:ﾠ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2569977/list-of-selenium-rc-browser-launchers.

Sometimes it's just that simple, but sometimes it's not...and when it's not, it can be a real pain to figure out.ﾠ WIth some trial and error, I was able to get Selenium Server/CFSelenium to interact with all of the browsers I had installed on my Windows and Macintosh laptops.ﾠ Here's what I had to do it each case:

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