I’m trying to test a google maps app with Rails3. I’m using cucumber with capybara and selenium for JavaScript testing.
I have a map where I wait for google maps to be loaded, and then send an ajax request to my server, where I get locations that I’m inserting into the map.
I’m wondering if it’s possible with selenium to wait until google maps is loaded, the ajax call to my server is finished and the marker are placed inside the map. The other issue is, how to select this marker within google maps. Are there any selectors?
Or should I go the other way, and use a JS testing framework like Jasmine to test if my classes are loaded and so on. I don’t have any experience with Jasmine, so is it possible to test a google maps?
Maybe someone knows a solution, or a hint if it’s not possible, or a workaround or… 😉
[UPDATE 1]
I’ve found out how to select markers in google maps. If you look at googles selenium tests you can check out what they are doing. For example selecting a marker:
waitForElementPresent xpath=//img[contains(@src,'marker')]
But here comes the next problem. How do I select a specific marker? Is there a way inside the javascript google maps API to assign an ID to it, so that I can use #marker_1, #marker_2…?
And another strange thing is, that function like wait_for_element or wait_for_condition aren’t available inside my cucumber step definitions. Are the google selenium tests using own function like that waitForElementPresent? Or are this standard selenium functions? I’ve found a lots of posts, where they always use something like
selenium.wait_for_condition
selenium.wait_for_element
or
@selenium.wait_for_condition
...
Inside my step definitions the selenium and the @selenium var a nil. How can I access this methods? I’ve also found this post, but it is from Oct. ’08, so I think there must be a better solution (btw. this solution works on the first sight).
Like on this page, they give an overview of a few selenium methods how to wait for a condition or element. Is this still present? How can I use this functions?
[UPDATE 2]
Damn it, I’ve found out, that the selenium tests I mentioned above are for V2 of google maps, not for V3. I have tried it with
wait_until { page.has_xpath?("//img[contains(@src,'marker')]") }
But it doesn’t work. The marker is visible on the map, but I get a timeout error, because with this XPath selector it is not found. I’m wondering if it is generally possible to select a marker out of the DOM.
I also tried to assign an additional attribute to the marker when I create it:
// marker is the marker returned by google maps after adding it to the map
$(marker).attr('id', "marker_1");
But when I try to access it with the jQuery selector $("#marker_1"), it doesn’t find it. So, still no solution, yet.
What I do with mine is to execute the calls in your step definitions like so:
page.execute_script(“launchmap()”)
then check for their existence in the page..then do your normal ajax check in capybara. the marker will be contained in a div right? then if you call launchmap and create the markers, capybara SHOULD be able find your markers
UPDATE
found out about this plugin: http://vigetlabs.github.com/jmapping/examples/
it gives you semantic markup for your google maps(for graceful degradation) allowing you to actually check if a marker exists using capybara. hope it helps(dont have time to test it but it looks promising)