Testing a "Dojo" web application with Selenium

Question

Has anyone done some extensive automation with Selenium and a Dojo-heavy web app? I'm looking for any issues or problem that you might have run into or issues related directly to the combination of Selenium and Dojo.

Answer 1

If you need to test in an SSL environment and you use Selenium RC's trustAllSslCertificates + proxy, you must make sure all of your JS files are hosted on the same domain. I've seen problems recently with using CDNs to load JS and image files when testing under recent Firefox versions and selenium rc

Answer 2

The biggest issue I encountered was the fact that dojo menus, and pop-up UI elements in general, are absolutely positioned as children of the body element and are not children of the element that creates them.

This can impact how you write Selenium CSS Selector and, in my case, made it a bit more challenging to automatically crop a screenshot that includes a menu and its dropdown.

Answer 3

I'm working on a Dojo-heavy app right now, and am making a number of tests with Selenium IDE. I've ran into a few issues with certain Dojo elements, such as drop down menus and tabbed components. I've learned to appreciate XPath, and have been experimenting with how clickAt and waitForElementPosition commands, which seem to help accommodate for some of Dojo's features.

Answer 4

I have no experience, but did see http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-webautoselenium/index.html discussing how to use Selenium with dojo

Answer 5

Dojo specifics - very brief

The Dojo itself differs in some approaches from other heavy-DOM and extensively impressive frameworks (like ExtJS, jQuery, YUI).

The general Dojo specific it workaround the limitations by using Flash (YUI does as well) or Silverlight.

Here is a couple scenarious when Dojo can use Fash:

1. the browser is not HTML5 and javascript need local storage. Then Dojo will use "Flash Cookie" Flash Local Shared Objects (package dojox.storage)

2. need support of cross domain https calls.

The general tricks that can turn your testing into something difficult:

1. browser messages, like "do you wish to allow this site..."

2. nested frames can make the selection of the node difficult

3. javascript timeout/intervals they might work with different speed in Selenium then in real browser. Yes they can.

Answer 6

I've used Selenium extensively with a bunch of different web apps, including a few on Dojo. You should be fine. One practice I would recommend is to make sure all the components you'll be testing (both UI controls you'll be driving, as well as text components you'll be reading for testing) have ID tags set. Selenium has a bunch of elegant selectors to get at the elements you need, but selection by ID is still the best. The other methods can be more brittle.

I've had some challenging experiences with Selenium RC not being as compatible with my code as Selenium IDE, to the point that I stopped using Selenium RC. And in case you are not super familiar with Selenium, you should be aware that it doesn't natively support some (IMO) pretty fundamental features like flow control and includes; but there are user extensions to the framework that allow this. I'd also recommend taking a look at Watir which I now generally prefer over Selenium because it exposes the full power/flexibility of a first class language (Ruby).

Answer 7

Selenium should be fine with dojo because it's rendered in Firefox and not on it's own. Just make sure dojo is available when testing ( i.e. don't connect to google's cdn if your test environment doesn't have an internet connection ). But that's a problem you'd have with any external resource