Selenium and Ajax Requests

Following Lance Ivy’s excellent post (http://codelevy.com/articles/2007/11/05/selenium-and-ajax-requests), here’s an easy way to write Selenium tests for Ajax requests when you’re not using Prototype directly, but using Ajax4JSF or RichFaces.

Add this to your user-extensions.js:

/** * Registers with the a4j library to record when an Ajax request * finishes. * * Call this after the most recent page load but before any Ajax requests. * * Once you've called this for a page, you should call waitForA4jRequest at * every opportunity, to make sure the A4jRequestFinished flag is consumed. */Selenium.prototype.doWatchA4jRequests = function() { var testWindow = selenium.browserbot.getCurrentWindow(); // workaround for Selenium IDE 1b2 bug, see // http://clearspace.openqa.org/message/46135 if (testWindow.wrappedJSObject) {   testWindow = testWindow.wrappedJSObject; } testWindow.A4J.AJAX.AddListener({  onafterajax: function() {Selenium.A4jRequestFinished = true} });}

/** * If you've set up with watchA4jRequests, this routine will wait until * an Ajax request has finished and then return. */Selenium.prototype.doWaitForA4jRequest = function(timeout) { return Selenium.decorateFunctionWithTimeout(function() {  if (Selenium.A4jRequestFinished) {   Selenium.A4jRequestFinished = false;   return true;  }  return false; }, timeout);}

Selenium.A4jRequestFinished = false;

Instead of using pauses or waitForCondition (writing some esoteric javascript test to detect that the Ajax call ended), you can then write something as simple as:

<tr> <td>watchA4jRequests</td> <td></td> <td></td></tr>

... (command triggering the ajax call) ...

<tr> <td>waitForA4jRequest</td> <td>10000</td> <td></td></tr></pre>

For Selenium beginners, the Javascript code has to be placed in a file named user-extensions.js and passed as an attribute to the Selenium Server command line option “-user-extensions <file>”. When using Selenium IDE, it can be set in the options menu (don’t forget to close the IDE and restart it for this to be taken into account).