Selenium Assertions and waitFors in FlexMonkium

In our previous video, we saw recording and playback of Flex interactions interleaved with browser interactions within a single Selenium script. Today's video shows how we can execute FlexMonkey Verify commands as assertions or waitFor predicates within a Selenium script.

The video shows a simply script being played back at slow speed. When we then try to play the same script back at fast speed, it fails because the script navigates to the page containing a Flex app, but then attempts to interact with it before the app has finished loading.

What we would like to do is have a way to tell Selenium to wait for some condition that signals the app has finished loading. One way to do this is to have Selenium wait for the appearance of a component within the application's window. We interactively create a FlexMonkey Verify command that tests whether the name field has a blank value. Notice that when we create this command, it is also "recorded" by the Selenium IDE as an assertion, assertFlexVerify.

This assertion will fail if it is executed before the swf has finished loading. However, we can ask Selenium to wait for the condition to become true by changing the assertFlexVerify command to be a waitForFlexVerify instead. Now, when we run the script, it waits for the swf to load before continuing, and then successfullly plays the rest of the script at high speed. We can of course use a similar technique to have a Selenium script wait for other Flex application events, such as data being returned from a query to be displayed in a table.



As you can see, we have all the major mechanisms necessary to very clean integration of FlexMonkey and Selenium. There is some trivial syntactic sugar we will likely sprinkle on what the video shows here, and we've still got some code clean up to do before we'll be ready to release, but we believe all the hard problems have been solved so it won't be much longer before FlexMonkium, the FlexMonkey Plug-In for Selenium, is publicly available!