Question

So, I’m going through the selenium test design considerations documentation and I have a question about the UI Mapping section found here:
http://seleniumhq.org/docs/06_test_design_considerations.html#ui-mapping

They suggest to create a properties file like so:

admin.username = loginForm:tbUsername
admin.loginbutton = loginForm:btnLogin
admin.events.createnewevent = adminHomeForm:_activitynew
admin.events.cancel = addEditEventForm:_IDcancel
admin.events.viewoldevents = adminHomeForm:_activityold

That maps an html object to a keyword

Then they will use it like so:

selenium.type(admin.username, "xxxxxxxx");

However, from what I’ve seen about the Properties Object it works very similar to a hashtable. Now I’m loading my properties file as shown here:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/environment/properties.html
under the create and load default properties section

So todo the same statement in the docs I need todo:

selenium.type(loadedProps.get(admin.username), "xxxxxxx");

which isn’t bad, just not as readable as their example, so my question is how do I load the properties file so I can use the keywords like they do.
Also, I’m thinking about going with Page Object Design Pattern, so if I did go that way, would I define a PageObject Base class, which loads
the properties file and then all the page object classes that extends the base will have access to the properties, is this sound reasoning?

Answer 1

in java, since ‘.’ has meaning as an operator, you can’t make it look exactly like their example (not sure what they were getting at). you could do something like:

setup code:

public class Config {
  public static String admin_username;

  static {
    Properties props = ...;
    admin_username = props.getProperty("admin.username");
  }
}

usage code:

import static Config.*;

selenium.type(admin_username, "xxxxxxxx");

if you really got crazy, you could load the Config class using reflection (to remove the boilerplate in the “static” block).