So I’m sitting on the plane on the way back to Perth for the weekend and thought I’d throw together a post on the new improved Web Testing capability within Visual Studio Team System 2010 beta .
I remember first getting Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite and trying the Web Testing capabilities with SharePoint. It failed horribly due to the way in which SharePoint renders it’s XHTML.
Fortunately with 2010, the approach has got a lot better, but will still require some custom coding. The immediate benefit is that it gives you the Visual Studio IDE.
The below scenario does highlight a few issues that we’ll have in the SharePoint World with using Web Tests.
Create Test Project
Selection File | New Project from Visual Studio gives you a much improved New Project window:
You’ll get a load of waffle about tests in a .txt document:
and a project structure:
New Web Test
So I’m interested in creating a new Web Test:
Immediately a Windows Internet Explorer (yes it’s IE only) window pops up with a Web Test side bar:
It’s defaulted to start recording immediately any actions I do within Internet Explorer.
For a typical scenario I wanted to record going into a SharePoint Team Site, creating a new List, adding a custom Site Column, and then creating a new List Item. I then want to replay this test on a new SharePoint Team Site to see whether it’ll replay and create the things the same.
As you can see from above team site, it records your steps as you go along. Clicking stop, closes Internet Explorer and returns you back to Visual Studio.
Dynamic Parameters
It’ll go through and detect dynamic parameters for you:
In this scenario it detected:
Which it found on the newform.aspx as a hidden <input> form variable. Looking in the View Source in IE I found:
<INPUT id="__EVENTTARGET" type="hidden" name="__EVENTTARGET" value="" />
Obviously this was not going to be of any use. After this the test appears in the main panel:
First Hurdle: Error re-running Test
In the Test Results, it actually showed up with this:
basically it tried to run the Test again in the same site...and failed. Clicking on the failure gives you more details:
Not very detailed unfortunately.
Changing URLs
Looking further at the steps…to get this test to re-run in a new environment I need to change the url in the steps:
Parametersing Web Servers
Now I can paramaterise the web server, but that is not going to help as it is a sub site collection off the main Web Application I wish to change and this option will only do the root url:
Generate Code
Clicking the Generate Code button:
Creates a C# equivalent Web Test (much like WATIN recorder does):
The beauty of this is I can no do a find and replace, or even parameterise the site url:
You can then open the new “Coded Test” and run this:
Immediately I noticed I get an exception error on a step. Searching in my Coded Test I found:
request10Body.FormPostParameters.Add("AddToAllContentTypes", this.Context["$HIDDEN1.AddToAllContentTypes"].ToString());
For some reason this isn’t in the Context of the page when it is executed in this instance…but I got green lights on all the other steps?!? I then noticed above in that step:
request10.QueryStringParameters.Add("NextUsing", "http%3A%2F%2Fwin%2D0xqbnqw37uf%3A81%2Fsites%2FDevSite%2F%5Flayouts%2FListEdit%2Ea" +
"spx%3FList%3D%257BB84E37C2%252D4D8D%252D43B3%252DADCA%252DD8F18789892B%257D", false, false);
So the QueryString is being added to the page and as you can see there is an encoded url that I missed! Looking further there were quite a few encoded urls, so I had to parameterise these too!
This time when I re-run, I could see that it was staying on teh StagingSIte now but I was still getting the same error…you can actually click on each step in the Web Test and see what page was rendered. Clicking through from beginning I got this error:
So the listedit.aspx page was getting an error, immediately I noticed that the listedit.aspx is hanging off the layouts directory and has no context of the list…so figured the ListId is in the form post or something…
request7.QueryStringParameters.Add("List", "%7BB84E37C2%2D4D8D%2D43B3%2DADCA%2DD8F18789892B%7D", false, false);
So I need to pass the Guid of the List through…this is suddenly getting a lot bloody harder than it should be! Poking around in the view source of the page from the step before the listedit.aspx (where I clicked on the List Settings I found this:
<a href="/sites/StagingSite/_layouts/listedit.aspx?List=d1d50bba-78ce-4c36-92b5-84ef88b45a4b">Modify settings and columns</a>
So potentially I could go and Extract this url rather than it explicitly setting it.
Limitations
But really i just want to tell the Web Test to click on the Hyperlink because I know that the hyperlink does the query string correctly rather than me forcing it!
This seems to be a limitation of how the Web Tests work as it seems dependent on server side Form Posts and Query Strings for tests. Obviously this is not going to be very useful for very dynamic AJAX orientated sites where it may be dependent on where the user clicks on the screen as apposed to predetermined form post and query string parameters.
If anyone can prove me wrong about this stuff I’d really appreciate it!
Other Neat Features
Changing Parameters
You’ll also notice further down where the newform.aspx action is handled that there are various FormPostParameters added as this is how the newform.aspx operates…as it’s an ASP.NET at heart ;-)
I can then start doing things like replacing:
request5Body.FormPostParameters.Add("Title", "Test");
with parametised titles:
request5Body.FormPostParameters.Add("Title", newListTitle);
This can be extended further by having a data source, say for instance a SQL Database Table with rows and repeating this test for each row using the test data in the table.
Validation Rules
Also at the bottom of the Web Test are various ‘Validation Rules’ it creates by default:
Other Validation rules can be added to validate a web test:
This could come in handy to check the redirected url is correct, or the response time of the page, or that certain text is on the page etc.