UI automated testing using Selenium in Badgeyay

With all the major functionalities packed into the badgeyay web application, it was time to add some automation testing to automate the review process in case of known errors and check if code contribution by contributors is not breaking anything. We decided to go with Selenium for our testing requirements.

What is Selenium?

Selenium is a portable software-testing framework for web applications. Selenium provides a playback (formerly also recording) tool for authoring tests without the need to learn a test scripting language. In other words, Selenium does browser automation:, Selenium tells a browser to click some element, populate and submit a form, navigate to a page and any other form of user interaction.

Selenium supports multiple languages including C#, Groovy, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Scala. Here, we are going to use Python (and specifically python 2.7).

First things first:
To install these package run this code on the CLI:

pip install selenium==2.40
pip install nose

Don’t forget to add them in the requirements.txt file

Web Browser:
We also need to have Firefox installed on your machine.

Writing the Test
An automated test automates what you’d do via manual testing – but it is done by the computer. This frees up time and allows you to do other things, as well as repeat your testing. The test code is going to run a series of instructions to interact with a web browser – mimicking how an actual end user would interact with an application. The script is going to navigate the browser, click a button, enter some text input, click a radio button, select a drop down, drag and drop, etc. In short, the code tests the functionality of the web application.

A test for the web page title:

import unittest
from selenium import webdriver

class SampleTest(unittest.TestCase):

    @classmethod
    def setUpClass(cls):
        cls.driver = webdriver.Firefox()
        cls.driver.get('http://badgeyay-dev.herokuapp.com/')

    def test_title(self):
        self.assertEqual(self.driver.title, 'Badgeyay')

    @classmethod
    def tearDownClass(cls):
        cls.driver.quit()

 

Run the test using nose test.py

Clicking the element
For our next test, we click the menu button, and check if the menu becomes visible.

elem = self.driver.find_element_by_css_selector(".custom-menu-content")
self.driver.find_element_by_css_selector(".glyphicon-th").click()
self.assertTrue(elem.is_displayed())

 

Uploading a CSV file:
For our next test, we upload a CSV file and see if a success message pops up.

def test_upload(self):
        Imagepath = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(os.getcwd(), 'badges/badge_1.png'))
        CSVpath = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(os.getcwd(), 'sample/vip.png.csv'))
        self.driver.find_element_by_name("file").send_keys(CSVpath)
        self.driver.find_element_by_name("image").send_keys(Imagepath)
        self.driver.find_element_by_css_selector("form .btn-primary").click()
        time.sleep(3)
        success = self.driver.find_element_by_css_selector(".flash-success")
        self.assertIn(u'Your badges has been successfully generated!', success.text)

 

The entire code can be found on: https://github.com/fossasia/badgeyay/tree/development/app/tests

We can also use the Phantom.js package along with Selenium for UI testing purposes without opening a web browser. We use this for badgeyay to run the tests for every commit in Travis CI which cannot open a program window.

Resources

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badgeYAY – An abrupt flow of code

Badgeyay is a web application which takes a CSV file, an image file and an optional config.json file, and converts them into a PDF file which consist of a set of badges as per the data in the CSV and the image as its background. In order to contribute to the badgeyay repository, a contributor is expected to have some knowledge of Python Flask, HTML and CSS. An understanding of git version control system is inevitable in open source.

Flask – Web development in baby steps

First things first – Having a local copy

Sign up for GitHub and head over to the Badgeyay repository. Then follow these steps.

  1. Go ahead and Fork the repository
  2. Star the repository
  3. Get the clone of the forked version on you local machine using git clone https://github.com/<username>/badgeyay.git
  4. Add upstream using git remote add upstream https://github.com/fossasia/badgeyay.git

How a flask application works

A flask application basically consists of an app.py or main.py file which is run using the command python main.py

The main.py file consists of:


from flask import Flask, render_template
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route('/')
def index():
return render_template('index.html')
if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run(debug=True)

This snippet starts the flask server at localhost:5000 and index.html template gets rendered on visiting the root url. All the templates reside in templates folder while the static asset files are stored in static folder.

Steps:

  1. First. we imported the Flask class and a function render_template.
  2. Next, we created a new instance of the Flask class.
  3. We then mapped the URL / to the function index(). Now, when someone visits this URL, the function index() will execute.
  4. The function index() uses the Flask function render_template() to render the index.html template we just created from the templates/ folder to the browser.
  5. Finally, we use run() to run our app on a local server. We’ll set the debug flag to true, so we can view any applicable error messages if something goes wrong, and so that the local server automatically reloads after we’ve made changes to the code.

The template consists of a base layout which is extended by the pages.

templates/layout.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Flask App</title>
</head>
<body>
<header>
<h1 class="logo">Flask App</h1>
</header>

{% block content %}
{% endblock %}

</body>
</html>

templates/index.html

{% extends "layout.html" %}
{% block content %}
<h2>Welcome to the Flask app</h2>
<h3>This is the index page for the Flask app</h3>
<h3>{% endblock %}</h3>

With this and a little understanding of python, and you are all set to contribute to flask repositories such as badgeyay.

Resources

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