Using Applitools within Katalon Studio

What is this?

This is a simple Katalon Studio project for demonstration purpose. You can check this out onto your PC and execute with your Katalon Studio.

This will show you how I managed to use Applitools within Katalon Studio. Applitools is a visual testing and monitoring service. In this demo, a Test Case instanciates an Applitools' Eyes object and calls its methods. The Eyes object takes screenshots of AUT and transfer images to the Applitools service where various testing/monitoring features are offered.

Why I made this

I have experienced taking screenshot by Katalon keyword and found that taking screenshots is not enough. Taking screenshots is just a start. I will have to review all the images, think about them, and find problems if any. These tasks are difficult enough without appropriate tool's support.

One day I read a discussion in the Katalon Community Forum:

• 'Applitools | Anyone had success in setting up within Katalon'

Until then I was not aware of Applitools. I got interested in it and thought the idea of using Applitools within Katalon Studio would worth a try.

After a dozen hours of hacking, I have created a Katalon project here. In this demo project, a Katalon Test Case invokes Applitools Eyes API. This demo works for me.

How this project is designed

Applitools has a published article

• 'Walkthrough : Running a visual test and reviewing test results'

This article gives me an example of writing and running a visual test using native Selenium WebDriver combined with Applitools' Eyes SDK.

So I replaced 'native Selenium WebDriver' with 'Katalon Studio'. I modified the published example slightly to form a Katalon Test Case in Groovy.

How to run the Demo

1. You need to register yourself to Applitools and obtain your Applitools API Key.
2. On your PC, you want to create an environment variable APPLITOOLS_API_KEY to set the API Key as its value.
3. git clone this project to your PC. Start your Katalon Studio. Open the downloaded project.
4. load "Test Cases/test01" and Run it with Firefox or Chrome.
5. Ensure the Test Case ran successfully
6. In browser you want to sign in Applitools Eyes dashbord with your account.
7. In the https://eys.applitools.com/app/test-results page you will find a set of screenshots transfered to the Applitools service:

Points to be remarked

External dependencies

Katalon Studio has its own set of dependencies. Applitools has its own. Nobody takes responsibility of making these two consistent.

1. Applitools requires a lot of external libiraries. See 'Walkthrough : Running a visual test and reviewing test results' Getting SDK to see how to download the SDK Zip. The Java SDK contains 63 jar files.
2. I picked up 16 jar files out of the Applitools SDK and registered them into the Katalon Studio's project, as described in the Katalon document.
3. I have chosen 16 jar files by try-and-error basis. When I encounter a java.lang.NoClassDeffFoundError, I looked for an appropriate jar file in the downloaded SDK, and added it into Katalon Studio. I am not sure if these 16 jars are enough.

Notes on coding

As you can see test01, this sequence works:

WebUI.openBrowser('')
WebDriver innerDriver = DF.getWebDriver()
Eyes eyes = createEyes()
eyes.open(innerDriver, GlobalVariable.appName,
     GlobalVariable.testName, viewportSize)

First you open the browser by calling WebUI.openBrowser(), after that you should get the reference to the WebDriver object created by Katalon Studio.

On the other hand the following code does not work:

WebDriver innerDriver = DF.getWebDriver()
WebUI.openBrowser('')

You will encounter an Exception which sais:

Test Cases/test01 FAILED because (of) com.kms.katalon.core.webui.exception.BrowserNotOpenedException: Browser is not opened