VIVO-1424: Re-establish Selenium testing capability

[chenejac]

Mike Conlon (Migrated from VIVO-1424) said:

Vitro and VIVO have Selenium interface tests.  We'd like to be able to run them, and add to the collection of tests.

It was suggested that Selenium is platform-dependent and may not work with Firefox and/or may require browser specific versions.  We will need to investigate.

[chenejac]

Benjamin Gross said:

^^^ 

Just a note, edited the ticket since I wasn't the one who spoke up about platform dependency, I'm not familiar with Selenium.

[chenejac]

Jim Blake said:

The "problem" here is that the Selenium IDE is a Firefox add-on, which has not been supported (and does not work) past Firefox 54.

It has long been possible to use browsers other than Firefox to run Selenium tests, but only Firefox has supported the IDE for recording/writing tests and interactive execution.

This Is not a show-stopper, since it is possible to write Selenium tests programmatically, and to execute them in other test harnesses. However, changing our way of operating would certainly require a learning curve, and might also require re-writing the tests.

Some quick research suggests "Katalon Recorder" might be used to replace Selenium IDE. More investigation is needed.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/katalon-automation-record/]

[https://www.katalon.com/]

 

[chenejac]

Christian Hauschke said:

There is a chrome extension that could be useful, too, maybe?

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/selenium-ide/mooikfkahbdckldjjndioackbalphokd]

 

 

[chenejac]

Jim Blake said:

Attaching a copy of the checklist that Cornell used for running Selenium tests. (Microsoft Word)

[chenejac]

Christian Hauschke said:

Thanks, that really helps to get an impression what could be done. I just tried to set up a short test with the chrome extension, and it worked. My test scenario:

Login, create instance of class faculty member, some navigation stuff, log out. Works like a charm.  Maybe you can share your old "projects" or Selenium scripts, than they could be reused in chrome.

I have no experience with this kind of testing, but as a laymen this seems to be very useful.

[chenejac]

Jim Blake said:

[~accountid:6113d5edb704b400686dc540], the old Selenium scripts can be found here:

https://github.com/vivo-project/VIVO/tree/develop/legacy/utilities/acceptance-tests/suites

[chenejac]

Jim Blake said:

So it appears that we can indeed write and run Selenium tests, using some browser plug-in or another. This leaves us with these initial tasks:

• Decide on the test environment, and document it
• Update most of the existing Selenium scripts so they will pass with VIVO 1.10. 
• Re-design or delete the most troublesome scripts.

What do I mean by "troublesome scripts"? Basically, they fall into two categories:

• Race conditions: Some tests will not pass until a background thread completes its work. Usually, this thread is updating the search index. In the past, these challenges have been "solved" by inserting a pause into the test script, waiting 1 second, 3 seconds, 5 seconds, whatever the test developer finds is necessary. This was problematic, because the pause was not dynamic, and so must be long enough to accommodate the worst case delay. ** An attempt was begun to create a VIVO call that would wait for background threads to complete. A call to

http://localhost:8080/vivo/admin/wait?waitLimit=10

would run WaitForBackgroundThreadsController, which returns 200 when the background threads become idle, or 503 if the wait limit (in seconds) expires. As far as I know, this feature was created but never used in the tests. It might work.

• File uploads: Some tests require that the absolute path of a file be specified. These are inherently system-dependent. An obvious example is a path which is system-dependent, like this: 

C:\acceptance-tests\CreatePeople\facultyImage.jpg

but an absolute path is inherently brittle, even if it is syntactically valid. 

• ** This affects tests that upload images, tests that ingest RDF from a file, etc.  *** some of the tests for language support fall into this category.