I am looking into multiple web testing tools. I am trying watir now. My main concern is dealing with javascript. I just want to know if anyone can give me an overview on dealing with javascript in watir. What are some of the pitfalls and difficulties with it? Is it basically using javascript injections to tell the page what to do?
And if someone wants to suggest other web testing tools like watir I would appreciate it.
I tried selenium first and found it to be a tad unreliable.
Are there any cheap tools on the market?
Thank You!
Tim provides a pretty good answer.
The only thing I have to add to what he said is that I’ve found that now and then I have to use the watir methods to fire specific javascript events such as onmouseover in order to accurately simulate the user interacting with the page. Since watir has a method for this, the hard part is not the watir code, but reverse engineering the page (or noticing subtle page interactions based on user actions) to figure out what elements are ‘wired’ up to what events and the order to fire those events against those specific elements.
Usually it’s pretty easy to look at the HTML for an element and see what’s going on. But with some custom controls it can take a bit of learning because they manage to do a pretty good job of ‘hiding’ all the event wiring, and you may have to parse through various aspects of the page (styles and all) using something like fiddler.
(after all, the normal user will never ‘force’ javacript to execute, or ‘inject’ javascript. They will use the mouse and keyboard to interact with the page, and any javascript is going to be a result of scripts that execute when the page is loaded, or as a result of scripts triggered via events based on specific user actions)