Test Dynamic Web Pages

Typically, when testing web pages, you check whether a page is fully loaded to make sure that all the needed objects exist. TestComplete provides several methods that let you wait for a web page to load, such as ToUrl, Wait and WaitPage. TestComplete automatically records the Wait operations when you load pages in a web browser while recording a test, and you can also add the necessary Wait operations to the tests you created manually. For more information, see Wait For Web Pages.

The mentioned methods wait until the page’s original HTML code is completely loaded from the server to the client computer before proceeding to the next operation. However, scripts in dynamic web pages may load additional content or modify the existing content after the page has been loaded. If the needed web page object is not populated yet, your test will fail.

To resolve the problem, you have to check whether the desired web objects exist before performing any operations over them. You can modify your tests in order to make them wait until the desired objects become available before you start working with them. For more information on how to do this, see Waiting for an Object, Process or Window Activation.

The most appropriate way to resolve the problem with identification of dynamic objects is using Name Mapping. When you add an object to the Name Mapping repository and define a custom name for it, you specify criteria that will be used to uniquely identify this object in the application. When TestComplete comes across a custom name during the test playback, it calls the Name Mapping engine to search the object tree for the object that has the specified properties, and once this object is found, it returns it to the test engine.

Name Mapping also includes several settings that help identify dynamic objects. For a brief description of the available settings, see below:

List of Additional Name Mapping Settings

List of Additional Name Mapping SettingsList of Additional Name Mapping Settings

• The most important option you can use when testing dynamic web pages is Extended Find. Suppose you are working with a web page that has a number of intermediate containers that are created and deleted according to certain user actions. To make sure that the desired object will be found regardless of which containers exist at the moment, exclude all the useless containers from Name Mapping and enable the Extended Find setting. This instructs TestComplete to search for the object not only on one specific level of the application’s object hierarchy, but also on all the nested levels. For detailed information on how to do this, see Extended Search.

• Another available option is Required Children. It allows you to specify the presence of a child object in an object’s mapping criteria. You can use this option if the properties and values are not enough for object identification. For a detailed description, see Required Children.

• One more option is Conditional Mode. If the identification properties and values of the needed objects change during the application run, you can specify mapping criteria as a compound conditional expression. It specifies several possible values for varying an identification property, so that the object is correctly identified in any case. For detailed information, see Conditional Mapping Criteria.

Another way to handle dynamic objects is to dynamically search for the objects using certain criteria. TestComplete provides a number of search methods that allow you to find the desired object on a web page. For example, you can search for a link using its text, find an input field of a specific type and so on.

TestComplete search methods allow you to specify the search scope and depth. You can increase the search depth in order to perform a search on the entire web page or limit the search depth to search within a certain container object that holds the desired web object. You can also find one object, or all the objects that meet the specified criteria.

For a detailed description of the available methods, their initial search scope, sought-for properties and some other details, see About Finding Objects on Web Pages.