Troubleshooting for Recorded Scripts

Transcription

1 Troubleshooting for Recorded Scripts Author: Yuan Yuan Wu Date: 2016/03/02 1

2 Contents Why do recorded scripts not work?... 3 Fixing common problems for recorded scripts Element cannot be found Pop-up window actions cannot be recorded correctly Pause command in the last line of the script does not pause waitforpagetoload needs a value Do not use open command too much Element is not visible

3 Why do recorded scripts not work? Some recorded scripts do not work on Selenium IDE or the Synthetic Playback agent. I think there are two main reasons. Selenium IDE is not perfect enough to record scripts, so sometimes we have to modify the recorded scripts manually so that they can work well on both Selenium IDE and the Synthetic Playback agent. Sometimes the script can work well on Selenium IDE, but does not work on the Synthetic Playback agent. That is because Synthetic Playback agent plays back the scripts with WebDriver, which runs the script slightly differently to Selenium IDE. Fixing common problems for recorded scripts Here are some common issues and solutions for recorded scripts not working in Selenium IDE or the Synthetic Playback agent. 1. Element cannot be found It is a very common issue that element cannot be found. Sometimes Selenium IDE does not record an element with a correct way, so the script will fail when it is played back on Selenium IDE. For example, an element has the random id 670c_id as below. The prefix 670c is random. But Selenium IDE finds the element by its id. The element cannot be found when it is played back on Selenium IDE. In this case, we can locate the element by using xpath instead of id as below. //*[contains(@id, _id )] means the element whose id containing the string _id. 3

4 There are several ways to locate the element. You can refer to the Selenium doc. Especially how to locate the element with XPath is the most important. Here is the link for the detailed usage.: 2. Pop-up window actions cannot be recorded correctly Selenium IDE cannot record correctly when a pop-up window is opened. That is, the actions for opening a pop-up window fail when the recorded script is played back with Selenium IDE. For example, we click the IT Help Central icon as below. After that, a new window pops up. And then we need to do some actions in the new window. 4

5 In this case, here are the correct steps as below to open a pop-up window. 1) Click IT Help Central icon 2) Wait some time so that the pop-up window has loaded completely 3) Switch to the new window so that you can do some actions in the new window 3. Pause command in the last line of the script does not pause If the command pause stays in the last line of a script, it does not pause as expected. It is a Selenium IDE issue, and I have opened the following defect: 5

6 For such scenario, you may have a test suite since a single script does not need to pause at the end. To work around the issue in the test suite, you can move the pause command to the first line of the next script. For example, we have a test suite composed of Load URL.html and Sign-in-page.html as below. But the pause command does not pause at all since it is in the last line of the script Load URL.html. In this case, we can move the pause command to the first line of the next script Sign-in-page.html as below. And then the pause command can pause 5 seconds as expected when we play back the test suite on Selenium IDE. 4. waitforpagetoload needs a value If a script has a command waitforpagetoload with no value, it can pass successfully on Selenium IDE but fails on the Synthetic Playback agent. For example, we have a script that passes even if the value for the command waitforpagetoload is empty. 6

7 But it fails on Synthetic agent due to Error: NumberFormatException. That is, the empty value for waitforpagetoload cannot be allowed. In this case, we can add a value for the command waitforpagetoload as below. Then it can work well on both Selenium IDE and the Synthetic Playback agent. 7

8 5. Do not use open command too much Some customers used too much open command when recording scripts, but actually it is unnecessary. For example, we have a script which does the following steps. 1) Open Harvard university page 2) Open a new page about Students 3) Open another new page about Alumni In this case, it uses too much open command which may bring timeout error when Synthetic agent playbacks the script. And it is unnecessary since we can just click a link in the opened page to open another page instead. That is, we can modify the script as below. It makes sense and is reasonable. 1) Open Harvard university page 2) Click a link Students 3) Click another link Alumni 8

9 6. Element is not visible Sometimes a script can pass successfully on Selenium IDE, but fails with exception Element is not currently visible and so may not be interacted with on Synthetic agent. For example, we want to click the element link=edit company address in a script, but unfortunately it is not visible on Synthetic agent. In this case, we should make the element visible as below before operating it. 1) Use JavaScript to locate the element and change the display value to block 2) Add the command runscript to run the above JavaScript code in the Selenium script 9