Automated Testing For Portal Application

[pradeepj kumar]

Hi All,
Is there any automated Testing Tool available for testing a Portal application? I tried with "JwebUnit", but it is not suitable for portal applications. F1 F1 F1 !!!

[Lasse Koskela]

Why isn't jWebUnit suitable for testing your portal application? After all, for a web browser, a portal web application is no different from any other web application--it's just HTML (and JavaScript) over HTTP.

And what the heck does "F1 F1 F1 !!!" mean?

[pradeepj kumar]

Have you ever tested Portal applications using Jwebunit?
JwebUnit is not suitable to test the Portal applications because of the following reasons.
1. Form elements names are encoded meaning, dynamically generated by portal container.
2. We can�t access a specific resource i.e a jsp by hard coding it in the URL as in normal web application. For example in a normal web application if the context root is "Bank" and if i have a resource named login.jsp under jsp folder, then i can access it by http://localhost:8080/Bank/jsp/login.jsp. But that is not possible in Portal application.

FYI - F1 Stands for help !

[Lasse Koskela]

Originally posted by pradeepj kumar:
Have you ever tested Portal applications using Jwebunit?

No, I haven't. Which is why I asked.

Originally posted by pradeepj kumar:
JwebUnit is not suitable to test the Portal applications because of the following reasons.
1. Form elements names are encoded meaning, dynamically generated by portal container.
2. We can�t access a specific resource i.e a jsp by hard coding it in the URL as in normal web application.

Yeah, I kind of suspected that 1) was the reason. In other words, portal frameworks suck in terms of testability. That, however, doesn't mean it's impossible to use tools like jWebUnit for testing portal applications. After all, if you can express your intent in plain English ("click that third link on the list"), surely it is possible to describe that same decision logic in a programming language. Your tool might not support the kind of logic you want to use out of the box, of course.

For example, would it be possible for you to encapsulate the generated links inside a <span id="foo">...</span> so that you could locate the links based on the surrounding span element's ID? jWebUnit is based on HttpUnit which has a more low-level API that gives you all the power to do whatever you want with the HTML page.

Originally posted by pradeepj kumar:
FYI - F1 Stands for help !

Ah. I wonder how many know that "F1" stands for "help"... Maybe you'd get more help if you'd just say "help"?