Powerful DOM Search & Validation using WebAii 1.1 & LINQ

One of the most powerful new (and probably least discovered) features of WebAii 1.1, is its expanded search support using LINQ. LINQ is Microsoft's latest technology introduced in .NET 3.5 that offers a highly rich and integrated query language inside .NET languages like C# or VB.NET.

It was relatively easy for us to realize how we can leverage the power of LINQ in WebAii. LINQ's most common use is to enable a rich syntax to query structured information and we thought it would serve a great purpose in also querying the DOM. Given that WebAii offers a 100% managed HTML DOM to the testcase, users can harness the full power of LINQ with their DOM Searches.

We first started by adding support to do LINQ queries on the Element object. So we introduced the Find.AllElements() that allows you to query the entire DOM tree using a LINQ expression.

For example:

Such powerful searchs makes it a lot easier and concise to do rich searches. Although this was a great enhancement to our search routine, we felt there is still more to be done. Most users are actually interested in querying a certain type of Html elements and not all of them. For example, if they want to query all tables, they will need to add another clause in the Where() clause that says element.tag == "table". In addition that, we realized that some of these searches might also want to leverage the strongly-typed HtmlControls suite that we have in WebAii. The HtmlControls suite offers a lot of rich context specific information regarding a specific Html tag. (i.e. Table's row count or even cell count). So if you are, for example, trying to use the Find.AllELements() to validate that all tables on a page have alteast 5 columns, you might have to write some pretty complex 'where' clause that defeats the purpose of making search easier using LINQ.

With that in mind, we decided that we definietly need to enable html filtering as part of our search API. We also thought that it would be great if we can make such filter based on a strongly typed HtmlControl type. For that purpose, we introduced the Find.AllControls<T>() function. This function is very powerful. I will use the rest of this blog post to go over some samples that use it.

Let's start with something simple. Let's say you simply want to get all the Images on a certain web page. With this API, you can simply do:

As you can see the Find.AllControls<T> already has all the information you need to get you the right set of images on the page. You can then loop through those images to do any validation or actions on them.

Let's take another example that leverages the rich API on our HtmlControl. Let's say you want to validate that all images on the www.gettyimages.com home page are actually loaded properly. In WebAii 1.1, we introduced the HtmlImage.IsLoaded() function that queries the DOM to validate that the image has actually loaded in the browser and is not a broken image. You can perform this validation in one line of code like this:

Very Nice, eh? Let's have some more fun with this API. Given that we are in elections season, let's say we want to go to Google's Elections News website and highlight all links that contain "Obama" with blue and "McCain" with Red. [Sounds like a CNN application to see who is getting more press J]. Here is the code that does this for us using WebAii 1.1:

If you have WebAii running, place the above code in a TestMethod and run it, looks pretty cool.

Ok, last, let's take a bit more complex validation scenario. Let's say we have a testcase that wants to validate that an ASP.NET DataGrid when put in edit mode, changes all the cells in Column 1 from labels to actual TextBox. How can we validate that?

We basically need to validate that:

1. All column 1 cells have one TextBox.
   
2. All column1 cells have only that textbox in that cell.
   

Here is the code using LINQ and Find.AllControls<> that does this for us:

That's it for now. We would love to hear your feedback about this feature or any other features in WebAii. We are in the process of revamping our online documentation to be more up to date with the WebAii 1.1 release. We are also starting an new effort to start blogging more about WebAii features and our Automation Design Canvas!!

Enjoy