Coded UI Tests with WebUI Test Studio Q2 2009

WebUI Test Studio joined the Q2 2009 release this week as well! Although the awaited major new features (such as Silverlight and the extended browsers support) will come with v2.0 in the Q3 release, I’d like to highlight some important changes we introduced.

WebUI Test Studio coded test steps

Should you have tried our advanced test automation solution or at least watched the videos on Telerik TV, you have noticed its cool tools are designed to ease the life of the test creators helping them generate automated tests simply by mouse clicking. However, WebUI Test Studio also supports coded steps and you can get the full power of WebAii Testing Framework. You can either create a new coded test step or convert a recorded one and further modify it (both approaches are demonstrated in this video).

Coded tests operate against RadControls on the page via their WebAii counterparts (we call them ‘wrappers’). Since we released a free WebAii Testing Framework with Q2 2009, I’d like to explain the difference between both control wrapper suites. They actually differ in the WebAii framework version they were built against, as follows:

• WebUI Test Studio wrappers -- running the current official WebAii v1.1.
• WebAii Testing Framework – running on WebAii 2.0 Beta2.

Still, as I mentioned in my previous post, we wanted to bring a clear and consistent WebAii RadControls API. We achieved that by major refactoring of the source code and separating the wrappers into a new assembly. Now both WebAii RadControls v1.1 (WebUI Test Studio) and 2.0 (WebAii Testing Framework) provide exactly the same API!

What’s changed?

For easy coded tests generation, all WebAii controls in WebUI Test Studio Q2 2009 reside in the same namespace – Telerik.WebAii.Controls.Html (we have also released Xaml/Silverlight RadControls with the WebAii Testing Framework). We have also renamed classes and methods for the sake of consistency.

Together with the RadControls Translators’ documentation we provide API reference documentation built as .chm file as well. In case the Visual Studio Intellisense and the documentation do not help, we will be happy to assist in resolving any issues concerning the old code you may have. Feel free to submit a support ticket sending your test project and we will fix the errors for you.

Although there is a separate assembly now, the tool automatically performs all the needed actions. I’m posting an example below.

WebAii test project with WebUI Test Studio Q2 2009

As soon as you create a new test project and add a new WebAii test

You will notice a couple of assembly references added automatically – both ArtOfTest and Telerik ones:

Now let’s record a simple test step against a RadControls demo and convert it to code:

We end up with a test code ready to be compiled and executed! Note the 'using' directives generated at the top:

Using WebAii Framework code in WebUI Test Studio

As you see the Test Studio completely supports coded UI tests as well. The consistency between WebAii API (as well as RadControls wrappers API) v1.1 and 2.0 allows for full code reuse!

Now you can start test automation in Silverlight as well! Yes, that’s right – we’ve already introduced the RadControls for Silverlight wrappers with WebAii Testing Framework. WebUI Test Studio v2.0 (Q3 2009) will complete the Silverlight test automation support adding the recorder and RadControls for Silverlight Translators. For more info on what’s planned for the next major release, please review this feature list.

WebUI Test Studio improvements in Q2 2009

The source code refactoring helped us isolate and fix some test execution performance hits. There are improvements in the area of data-driven testing for some controls as well as control-specific additions available. Please review the complete release notes.

We also highly recommend the new release for all the customers who have already upgraded their RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX or Silverlight based applications.

All the best,

Konstantin Petkov,

Telerik QA, WebUI Test Studio