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serenity-bdd / serenity-core

Serenity BDD is a test automation library designed to make writing automated acceptance tests easier, and more fun.
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Question: Page objects inside page objects? #1610

Closed hurjup closed 2 years ago

hurjup commented 5 years ago

Hi

Web applications today are typically single url ones. So page objects are better representation of "tiles" on the same level of the webUI, instead of being actual pages: menu bar, status bar, editor area, ...

Let's say there is a tile with sub-tiles; just like here (https://github.com/serenity-bdd/serenity-core/issues) the tickets themselves. The "roots" of these tickets have unique xpaths, but under the located webelement(facade) they have similar structure: icon, title, opened-by, number of comments. Which cries for being represented with pageobjects. Even if I think the answer is 'no', I still feel the urge to raise the question: Is there a way to initialize such sub-pageobjects from the parent pageobject? The happiest path would be providing parameters (like the xpath locator) to the constructor, and the rest would be done "on-demand" (upon invocation) through some serenity dependency injection magic.

More detailed, the imaginary usage: parent-tile.sub-tile("xpath_to_root_of_tile").numberOfComments.getText(); In the sub-tile all the @FindBy methods would look like

@FindBys({@FindBy(xpath="xpath_to_root_of_tile"), @FindBy(xyz = comment_element_locator)})
public WebElementFacade numberOfComments;

Thank you in advance!

wakaleo commented 5 years ago

In short, no. But Page Objects are an anti-pattern, and nested Page Objects doubly so. Tests should test user behaviour, not the UI. A better approach is to use Lean Page Objects or Screenplay (see https://johnfergusonsmart.com/page-objects-that-suck-less-tips-for-writing-more-maintainable-page-objects/).