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Verifying your web applications works

Recently I joined a project that was built on node.js and views were generated via jade templates. The node.js backend had a few very basic tests in the form of unit tests and frontend didn't have any tests. One of my tasks was to improve the test coverage. Following is a short description of the problem and a example solution how I resolved it.

Unit testing


I started by going through the existing tests and refactoring those so that they worked as expected and added tests for the functionality I had implemented previously. These tests were run via mocha.js and utilized chai.js and supertest.

These were very mainly unit tests except for the one's that utilized supertest which tested that the web application responded correctly to very basic http requests to routes like / or /login.

I want more


In a previous project that I worked in we had mocha tests that were run in a browser so that it tested the running application within a iframe via mocha. I always liked this approach as it was similar to what selenium webdriver does but much faster.

I considered using webdriver for testing the application from end-to-end but for some reason executing webdriver tests has always been slow and as I had seen a faster running solution I rejected webdriver very early and started investigating on how to implement in-browser end-to-end tests.

After half a day of searching I didn't find any sufficient and simple enough instructions on how to implement this kind of test setup but I did run into lots of headless test solutions and from there I found one promising library that could also execute tests via real browsers...

End-to-end testing via real browser


I came across a library that has been around for a few years and has a very basic testing functionality implemented and can run tests via phantom.js or Google Chrome: dalek.js

I gave it a test run against the application we were developing and I was satisfied on how easy it was to setup and run the tests. Dalek.js provides a basic test functionality and it provides a functionality so that one can execute custom javascript functions within tests.

Example test


I createad a simple example test that opens up GitHub front page, submits search form with text dalekjs and verifies the result. Let's go through it line by line:

module.exports = {
  'GitHub example testing': function (test) {
  test
    .open('https://github.com')
    .waitForElement('input[name=q]')
    .assert.title().is('GitHub · Build software better, together.', 'GitHub has the correct page title!')
    .type('input[name=q]', 'dalekjs')
    .submit('.js-site-search-form')
    .assert.text('.sort-bar > h3:nth-child(2)', 'We\'ve found 53 repository results')
    .done();
  }
};

Rows 1-3 setup the test with a given test name on row 2.
Row 4 the test opens up the given url.
Row 5 waits that the github search box is in the dom.
Row 6 asserts that the page has correct title.
Row 7 inputs a search string to the search box.
Row 8 submits the search form.
Row 9 asserts that the search results header is correct.
Row 10 ends the test.

This exactly same simple example test can be found from my GitHub repositories https://github.com/jorilytter/dalekjs-example with instructions on README of the repository for instructions on how to install the required node dependencies and how to run the test headless with phantom.js or in a Google Chrome browser instance.
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