About Cross-Platform Web Tests

Video Tutorial

Requirements

Supported web browsers

How it works

Addressing web objects in remote browsers

Simulating user actions in tests

Supported controls

CrossBrowserTesting Integration

Limitations

Known Issues

Sample project

• TestComplete 14.4.

• An active license for the TestComplete Web Module and for the Device Cloud add-on.

• The Web Testing plugin must be enabled in TestComplete (it is installed and enabled by default).

• The Device Cloud add-on must be installed and enabled in TestComplete (it is installed and enabled by default).

• To run tests in various browsers and on various devices, you must have Selenium Grid that manages them. It can be:

  • A private hub with Selenium Grid configured. It can be Selenium Grid running on your local computer or on a remote computer in your network. To learn more about installing and configuring Selenium Grid, see selenium.dev.

  • Selenium Grid provided as a service by CrossBrowserTesting.

    Note: The Device Cloud add-on provides free access to one parallel test run and an unlimited number of automation minutes you can use to run your tests in CrossBrowserTesting.com environments.

• Your Selenium Grid must be accessible from the computer where TestComplete is installed.

Supported web browsers

TestComplete introduces a new recording mode for creating cross-platform tests. You record a test on your local computer in the new mode, modify the test to run in remote environments managed by your Selenium Grid, and run the test:

1. On the Properties > Open Applications > Web Testing page of your project, enable the new web recording mode:

   

   Click the image to enlarge it.

2. Record a web test on your local computer in one of the browsers that TestComplete supports.

   Note: The choice only affects the test recording. You can then run the test in any web browser, including those that TestComplete does not support directly, like Safari, and so on.

   To learn more about recording cross-platform tests, see Creating Cross-Platform Web Tests.

3. Remove all local-browser-dependent commands (if any) from the recorded test. For instance:

   • From your keyword test, remove the Run Browser operation.

   • From your script test, remove the Browsers.Item().Run methods.

   • Remove any operations that interact with the browser own interface, for example, with its File menu or with standard dialogs called from the browser.

4. To your test, add instructions that will connect to your device lab provider, access the needed environment, and launch a web browser there:

   If you use CrossBrowserTesting

   If you use any other provider

   If you use CrossBrowserTesting

   In keyword tests

   To your test, add the Run Remote Browser operation and configure it to run the needed mobile or desktop browser.

   In scripts

   Use the Generate Run Code for CrossBrowserTesting dialog to generate code for running the needed mobile or desktop browser and insert the generated code into your test.

   If you use any other provider

   1. Use capabilities to describe remote environments in which you want to run the recorded test. Which capabilities you can use depend on your Selenium Grid provider. Please view your provider documentation for the list of available capabilities.

   2. Use the Browsers.RemoteItem(server, capabilities).Run method to run a web browser in the described environments. Here, capabilities is an object that describes the target remote environment and server is the URL of your Selenium Grid hub.

5. Iterate through remote browsers and run your recorded test in each of them. For an example, see Iterate Through Remote Testing Environments.

   To run tests in various browsers and on various devices, you must have Selenium Grid that manages them. It can be:

   • A private hub with Selenium Grid configured. It can be Selenium Grid running on your local computer or on a remote computer in your network. To learn more about installing and configuring Selenium Grid, see selenium.dev.

   • Selenium Grid provided as a service by CrossBrowserTesting.

     Note: The Device Cloud add-on provides free access to one parallel test run and an unlimited number of automation minutes you can use to run your tests in CrossBrowserTesting.com environments.

6. After the test run is over, the test results will be available on your local computer.

The default approach that relies on web objects’ properties and that TestComplete uses to access web objects in browsers running on your local computer is not applicable to remote browsers. That is why the new test mode implements a new browser-independent approach. Now, to address web objects, you use the FindElement and WaitElement methods. These methods locate web elements by CSS selectors and XPath expressions. To learn more, see Addressing Objects in Cross-Platform Web Tests.

To simulate user actions in cross-platform web tests, you use special methods and properties that TestComplete provides for most common web elements, for example, Click, DblClick, SetText, Keys, and so on.

TestComplete supports standard web elements. That is, your tests can interact with elements implemented as standard tags, like p, div, table, input, and so on. See List of Web Objects.

In addition, TestComplete provides support for third-party web controls and frameworks. It can recognize custom controls implemented with these frameworks and libraries as standard web elements and interact with them.

TestComplete provides advanced support for CrossBrowserTesting which is a web service for running web tests in real mobile and real desktop web browsers. You can find detailed information on CrossBrowserTesting on its website:

crossbrowsertesting.com

TestComplete is tightly integrated with CrossBrowserTesting providing a number of features to simplify running cross-platform web tests in its environments:

• In keyword tests, you can use the Run Remote Browser operation to specify and run a mobile or desktop web browser in a remote environment managed by CrossBrowserTesting.

• In scripts, you can use the Generate Run Code dialog to generate code that will specify and run a mobile or desktop web browser in a remote environment managed by CrossBrowserTesting.

• You can store your CrossBrowserTesting account credentials directly in your project not to specify them each time you connect to remote environments from your test (AuthKey is stored in the encrypted form).

  In addition, if you still do not have a CrossBrowserTesting account, you can sign up for a free trail directly from TestComplete.

• With the Device Cloud add-on license, you get free access to one parallel test run and an unlimited number of automation minutes for your CrossBrowserTesting.com account. You can use them to run your cross-platform web tests.

You can find the list of devices and browsers that CrossBrowserTesting provides for cross-platform testing on its website:

help.crossbrowsertesting.com/live-testing/general/browsers-devices-available

• Name Mapping is not supported.

• Applications created with Chromium Embedded Framework and Electron applications are not supported.

• Unlike default web tests, in cross-platform web tests, TestComplete does not provide any special script objects for third-party web controls (for example, DevExpress, Flash, jQuery UI, or Sencha Ext JS). It provides extended support for standard web controls only. See above.

• The Object Spy does not support locating objects in the Object Browser. When you click Highlight in Object Tree in the Object Spy, TestComplete will switch to the Object Browser and show the selected object’s properties and methods, however, it will not locate the object in the Object Tree.

• In cross-platform web tests, you can access native attributes, properties, and methods of your tested web page and run JavaScript expressions on the page. However, you can only access properties and methods and run scripts that return simple type data (integers, strings, and Booleans). If a property, method, or script expression returns a value of a complex type, for example, an object or a collection, TestComplete will represent it as a string.

• When your tested web application is running in a remote environment, its appearance may differ from the one it has on your local desktop computer. For example, when running in a remote mobile environment, your web application may use the hamburger menu not available on your local desktop computer. In addition, the test engine cannot access your tested web application in remote environments via the Object Browser and Object Spy. All this may affect the way you debug your tests when you encounter the 'Unable to Find the Object' error.

  Typically, this error occurs when the object specified by the search expression in your test does not actually exist on the tested web page. Because you cannot check whether the object exists in the application by picking it with the Object Spy or by examining the application screenshots, you have to check the web page’s source code manually. To do this, you can, for example, configure your project to post the entire web page source code to the test log to examine it later:

  1. Add a handler for the OnLogError event to your project. See Creating Event Handlers for TestComplete Events.

  2. Configure the event handler to post the page’s source code to the test log. To get the page’s source code, you can use the following expressions:

     Sys.Browser().Page("*").contentDocument.Script.eval("document.documentElement.outerHTML")

     To get the source code of an individual web page element, you can use the following expression:

     Sys.Browser().Page("*").FindElement(".container-wrap").outerHTML

     Note: Do not use the Log.Error method within the OnLogError handler.

  Examine your tested web page source code to learn if the problematic object actually exists.

When running your cross-platform web tests in remote environments, you may encounter a number of issues. For detailed information, see Known Issues.

TestComplete includes a sample cross-platform web test project that demonstrates how to connect to Selenium Grid and run web tests in remote environments. To open the project, select Samples > Cross-Platform Web on the TestComplete Start page:

Click the image to enlarge it.

You can also open the project file from your hard drive: <TestComplete 14 Samples>\Web\WebStore_CrossPlatform\WebStore_CrossPlatform_Sample_Project_Suite.pjs.

Note: To use the sample project, you need access to Selenium Grid managed by CrossBrowserTesting.com. If you do not have a CrossBrowserTesting.com account, you can sign up for a free trial directly from the TestComplete IDE.