Robot Has No Heart

Xavier Shay blogs here

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Selenium, webrat and the firefox beta

*UPDATE: * Latest version of webrat (0.5.3, maybe earlier) includes a fixed version of selenium, so you shouldn’t need this hack.

I needed a few hacks to get selenium running with webrat.

First, make sure you are running at least 0.4.4 of webrat. Don’t make the same mistake I did and upgrade your gem version, but not the plugin installed in vendor/plugins.

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gem install webrat
gem install selenium-client
gem install bmabey-database_cleaner --source=http://gems.github.com

There is a trick to get Firefox 3.5 beta working. The selenium server package with webrat 0.4.4 only supports FF 3.0.*. Follow these instructions, patching the jar that is packaged with webrat (vendor/selenium-server.jar) so that the extensions that selenium uses will be valid for the new FF.

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cd vendor/ # In webrat dir
jar xf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFFCHROME/extensions/readystate@openqa.org/install.rdf
jar xf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFFCHROME/extensions/{538F0036-F358-4f84-A764-89FB437166B4}/install.rdf
jar xf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFFCHROME/extensions/\{503A0CD4-EDC8-489b-853B-19E0BAA8F0A4\}/install.rdf 
jar xf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFF/extensions/readystate\@openqa.org/install.rdf 
jar xf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFF/extensions/\{538F0036-F358-4f84-A764-89FB437166B4\}/install.rdf

replace "3.0.*" "3.*" -- `find . | grep rdf`

jar uf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFFCHROME/extensions/readystate@openqa.org/install.rdf
jar uf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFFCHROME/extensions/{538F0036-F358-4f84-A764-89FB437166B4}/install.rdf
jar uf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFFCHROME/extensions/\{503A0CD4-EDC8-489b-853B-19E0BAA8F0A4\}/install.rdf 
jar uf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFF/extensions/readystate\@openqa.org/install.rdf 
jar uf selenium-server.jar \
customProfileDirCUSTFF/extensions/\{538F0036-F358-4f84-A764-89FB437166B4\}/install.rdf

(hat tip to space vatican)

I haven’t been able to get Safari working yet.

I want to run selenium tests besides normal webrat tests, so I created a new environment “acceptance” that I can run tests under. Modify your test helper file:

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# test/test_helper.rb
ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= "test"
raise "Can't run tests in #{ENV['RAILS_ENV']} environment" unless %w(test acceptance).include?(ENV["RAILS_ENV"])

require 'webrat'
require "test/env/#{ENV["RAILS_ENV"]}"

# ...

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# test/env/test.rb
require 'webrat/rails'

Webrat.configure do |config|
  config.mode = :rails
  config.open_error_files = false
end

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# test/env/acceptance.rb
require 'webrat/selenium/silence_stream'
require 'webrat/selenium'
require 'test/selenium_helpers'
require 'test/element_helpers'

# Required because we aren't isolating tests inside a transaction
require 'database_cleaner'
DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation

Webrat.configure do |config|
  config.mode = :selenium
end

class ActionController::IntegrationTest
  self.use_transactional_fixtures = false # Necessary, otherwise selenium will never see any changes!

  setup do |session|
    session.host! "localhost:3001"
  end

  teardown do
    DatabaseCleaner.clean
  end
end

# Hack: webrat requires this, even though we're not using rspec
module Spec
  module Expectations
    class ExpectationNotMetError < Exception
    end
  end
end

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# lib/tasks/test.rake
namespace :test do
  task :force_acceptance do
    ENV["RAILS_ENV"] = 'acceptance'
  end

  Rake::TestTask.new(:acceptance => :force_acceptance) do |t|
    t.test_files = FileList['test/acceptance/*_test.rb']
    t.verbose = true
  end
end

Notes

  • selenium and javascript helpers are from pivotallabs pat, they’re really handy for testing visibilty of DOM elements
  • there’s some magic in webrat to conditionally require silence_stream based on something in active_support. I don’t understand it quite enough, but requiring it explicitly was necessary to get things running for me
  • webrat/selenium assumes some classes are loaded that only happens if you’re using rspec. I’m not, so stubbed out the ExpectationNotMetError (it is only referred to in a rescue block).
  • rake test:acceptance runs the selenium tests. Running acceptance tests directly as a ruby script runs them using normal webrat – this is actually handy when writing tests because you get a quicker turnaround.
  • to pause selenium mid test run (to see wtf is going on), just add gets at the appropriate line in your test
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