Selenium – Creating Object Repository

Parameterization of a particular test is needed in order to avoid hard coding of values.  If a test is recorded with Selenium IDE, then all the values (e.g. locators) are hardcoded making it very difficult to execute with subsequent changes in the application.  In this post let us discuss a simple form of parameterization with creating a separate class for holding static variables for each locator.

The following example actually demonstrates the usage of parameterization.

Let us assume that our test suite contains more than 500 test cases and more than 50 different screens and we have thousands of objects on the application under test.  Multiple test cases may be (more than 10) using a particular screen (e.g. Contract creation screen).  If there is a change request from the client to enhance / change any of the object, then we need to update all the test cases.

In QTP, there is a concept called “Object Repository”.  All the objects are added to Object Repository and the objects are used in the test.  If there are any changes in the application then we need to update only Object Repository.

But in Selenium, there is no concept of Object Repository.  Using static variables we can create a similar kind of feature in order to handle frequent changes in the application under test (AUT).

We will have a look at the below code,

AdvancedSearch.java

package com.selftechy.parameterization;

import com.thoughtworks.selenium.*;
import org.junit.After;
import org.junit.Before;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.openqa.selenium.server.SeleniumServer;

public class AdvancedSearch extends SeleneseTestCase {
	private static SeleniumServer seleniumServer;
	@Before
	public void setUp() throws Exception {
	selenium = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, "*chrome", "http://www.google.co.in/");
        seleniumServer = new SeleniumServer();
        seleniumServer.start();
		selenium.start();
	}

	@Test
	public void testAdvancedSearch() throws Exception {
		selenium.open("http://www.google.com/");
		selenium.click("link=Advanced search");
		selenium.waitForPageToLoad("30000");
		selenium.type(ORas.wedAllTheseWords, "selftechy, selenium, eclipse");
		selenium.select(ORas.wlsResultsperPage, "label=20 results");
		selenium.click(ORas.btnAdvancedSearch);
		selenium.waitForPageToLoad("30000");
	}

	@After
	public void tearDown() throws Exception {
		selenium.stop();
		seleniumServer.stop();
	}
}

ORas.java:

package com.selftechy.parameterization;

/*
 * Author - Seetaram Hegde
 * This class holds all static values for objects of "Advanced Search"
 * page on Google Search
 * ORas - ObjectRepositoryAdvancedSearch
 * wed - Web Edit
 * wls - WebList - Dropdown
 * btn - Button
 */
public class ORas {
	public static final String wedAllTheseWords="as_q";
	public static final String wedExactWord="as_epq";
	public static final String wlsReadingLevel="tbs";
	public static final String wlsResultsperPage="num";
	public static final String btnAdvancedSearch="//input[@value='Advanced Search']";
}

ORlt.java:

package com.selftechy.parameterization;

/*
 * Author - Seetaram Hegde
 * This class holds all static values for objects of "Language Tools"
 * page on Google Search
 * ORlt - ObjectRepositoryLanguageTools
 */

public class ORlt {
	public static final String wedSearchFor="clirq";
	public static final String wedTranslateText="source";
	public static final String btnTranslateandSearch="Translate and Search";

}

In this example, I created two different classes “ORas” and “ORlt” for two different screens.  Both of these classes hold objects in the form of static variables.  Instead of using locators directly in the tests we are going to use the locators in the form of static variables.  Hence, there is no need to make any change to test cases, the only place where we need to make change is the “Class” containing static variable.