How to add a property an ASP.Net user control or web page and have that property read by Microsoft coded-ui testing? (CUIT)

Question

I am using Microsoft coded-ui testing (CUIT) in VS 2010 Ultimate to test an ASP.Net 4.0 site.

I have the source code to the ASP.Net site, so I can modify it as needed.

I've got record/playback working.

I can write simple assert statements in the test methods to check properties of the UITestControl descendents (HTML links, tables, etc.) and compare them to expected values.

I want to add properties to user controls (ASCX's) and pages in my site, to pass back useful values to the testing code.

For example, I have a user control that implements a menu which displays different sets of menu items depending on the role of the current user.

Rather than having the test script click at the various menu items to check whether or not they're present, I want to add a property to the user control. This property will return info to the caller, listing the menus and menu items present.

I've found info on the Net on how to do this in WinForms, but this code relies on accessability, which I believe is only useful for CUIT with WinForms. Likewise, I've found info on how to do it with WPF/SL.

The answer may be related to getting the UITestControl.NativeElement property, then calling a method that overrides GetProperty(), but I haven't been able to get this approach to work.

Can anyone provide a short code sample showing how to add a property to an ASCX or ASPX page, where that property can be written in C# code-behind, and read by Microsoft Coded UI Testing (CUIT) code?

Thanks!

Adam Leffert http://www.leffert.com

Answer 1

I haven't found an answer to this question, but I have written some code to solve the underlying problem.

I realized that adding properties to user controls would keep the validation data together with the control under test, but only for the case where the section of UI was implemented as a user control.

There are at least two other cases I need to cover:

1) Third-party controls added to the page, for example ASPxGridView, ASPxTreeView, etc.

2) Items that are not visible in the UI, for example the user profile data for the current user.

When you're running CUIT validation code with a Web app, the data you have available is DOM data, i.e. a tree that represents the contents of the Document Object Model of the contents of the browser window. There is no Request object, .Net Page object, etc. This DOM data is accessible through the UIMap object.

I don't want to wrap the third-party controls in user controls, because doing so would disturb the application under test, causing me to re-write the application code that touches properties and events of the grid, tree view, etc. Too intrusive for testing code.

So I created a code interface (ITestable) that contains a dictionary of string values, and a list of ITestable children.

In the LoadComplete event handler of the master page, I create an ITestable for the master page and fill the list with child ITestable objects for the child page, which can themselves contain lists of children.

I serialize this object into JSON, then store it in a hidden field on the master page.

I added the hidden field to the UIMap.

The test validation code deserializes the ITestable, then looks through it for values that need validation.

The controls create their own ITestable objects, so they can easily fill the objects with values that may be needed for validation, rather than forcing the test code to manipulate the UI trying to read validation values.

For example, a tree view could return its contents without the testing code having to click on each node and try to read the value displayed there. Additional properties (visible, enabled, etc.) can be stored in the values dictionary for each ITestable object.

CUIT has some very powerful features. I would very much appreciate it if Microsoft would document some best practices for solving these non-trivial validation problems. I've read through the Microsoft documentation but haven't found much on this topic for Web apps.