Running Scenarios with Selenium

Selenium is a powerful open-source tool for automated web testing. To demonstrate the use of JBehave with Selenium, we'll draw upon the fully-functional Ajax Email example webapp from Pico Web project.

Let's see how we can easily use Selenium to run web-based scenarios. As usual, we'll have a Scenario class that maps to a textual scenario, e.g.

Scenario: User logs in successfully

Given nobody is logged in
When user Gill Bates with password 1234 attempts to log in
Then the Inbox is selected
And there are some messages listed

Scenario: User fails to login with invalid password

Given nobody is logged in
When user Gill Bates with password 99999 attempts to log in
And there are no messages listed
And the text "Invalid Login" should be visible

Scenario: User fails to login with invalid username

Given nobody is logged in
When user Fred with password 1234 attempts to log in
Then the Inbox should not be visible
And the text "Invalid Login" should be visible

The objective in creating a DSL is to represent the business-domain functionality whilst abstracting away the details of the implementation, in this case the access to the web layer via a specific testing tool, such as Selenium. The same DSL should be re-usable with different testing tools.

The Scenario class will specify the Steps class is where all the Selenium magic happens:

public class AjaxEmailSteps extends SeleniumSteps {
    
    private Main main;
    private String[] lastFormValues;
    private String prefix;

    @Given("nobody is logged in")
    public void nobodyLoggedIn() {
        Main.logout(selenium);
    }

    @Given("user is viewing their Inbox")
    public void theyreInTheirInbox() {
        nobodyLoggedIn();
        logIn("Gill Bates", "1234");
        boxIsSelected("Inbox");
    }

    @When("user $userName with password $password attempts to log in")
    public void logIn(String userName, String password) {
        main = new LoginForm(selenium, runner).login(userName, password);
    }

    @Then("the Inbox should not be visible")
    public void inBoxIsNotVisible() {
    main.textIsNotVisible("Instant Millionaire");
    } 

    @Then("the text \"$text\" should be visible")
    public void textIsVisible(String text) {
    main.waitFor(new Text(text));
    }

    @Then("the text \"$text\" should not be visible")
    public void textIsNotVisible(String text) {
    waitFor(new Not(new Text(text)));
    }

    private void waitFor(Condition condition) {
    runner.waitFor(condition);
    waitFor(1);
    }
}

The @BeforeScenario and @AfterScenario annotations in the SeleniumSteps methods allow to start and stop the selenium server before and after scenario. Users can of course override the default behaviour, but generally don't need to bother for most use cases.

NOTE: To get the Selenium based tests running in an automated way, you need to run both a webapp server (e.g. Jetty) and the Selenium server. See the Ajax Email example webapp for a way to do this using Maven.