Software Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2008 : Web Testing - Recording a test

Creating web test

Creating a web test is similar to any other test in Visual Studio. There are three different ways to create a new web test:

Recording a test

Web applications can be easily tested by recording the requests with the recorder. This recorder will track all the web requests. We can easily find out the expected requests from the recorder and identify any defects coming along with the requested page. The user can request the web pages to record and create the test scenario. Once the scenario is created we can build the scenario or customize it to make it more dynamic.

As stated above, once after starting the web test, a new browser window opens with the web test recorder. Recorder has five different options discussed as follows:

• Record—to start recording the web page requests.

• Pause—this is used to pause the recording. In some cases we may not want to record some pages in the application. But we should have identified the pages for which we may have to pause the recording and restart the recording for the next coming pages.

• Stop—this is to stop the recording session. As soon as we click on the Stop button, the browser will close and the session will stop.

• Add a Comment—this option is used for adding any comments to the current request in the recording.

• Clear all requests—to clear out all the requests in the recording. Sometimes if we make some mistakes in the recording or if the web application that, we are testing is not the correct one, then we can clear all the requests and start from the beginning.

Before we proceed to the web testing let us create a sample web application for testing. Let's consider a user registration page where in the user has to provide the information like First Name, Last Name, Middle Name, User ID, and Password. This information is required to keep track of user activity in the web site, which is common in most of the web sites. For our example, let us consider only this registration page. It contains a Register option which collects all the information entered by the user and saves it to the database table. The user entries are validated as per the requirement, which we will see through the examples in subsections. The database is the SQL Server database with one table for storing all the information. We will use the SQL Server Express for all database operations. The next screenshot shows the database table for the sample application:

The sample application web page user interface is as shown below with some required fields including a fields to show the validation error messages and the Register button to send the request:

The application can be tested when it is hosted on a web server or when it is running on the local development web server within VSTS. The examples given in this article are based on the local VSTS development server. The approach is the same for hosted application on a web server like IIS 6.0.

As we are using the VSTS local development web server, build the new web project and keep it running. Get the web address from the running web application so that we have the web address with dynamic port assigned to it.

First let us look at the features of the web test and then we can go in detail about collecting information from test and the actual testing.

Create a new web test so that you get the new web test browser recorder window. The Web test tool opens the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser for the recording. Now in the Address bar enter the web page address and hit Enter. In this case it is going to be http://localhost:49459/TestingApp/Register.aspx (this is a test address using the local web server and will vary based on the dynamic port assigned to it). If you are planning to test the application from the hosted server, then record the test by browsing the web pages from the hosted server. Whether it is hosted server or a local development server, the web application should be up and running for testing. Once you get the web page, enter all the required details and click on Register. You can see each row getting added to the tree view below the recorder toolbar. All request details will get recorded until we hit the Stop button or Pause button. To get the test scenario right, enter all the required fields and perform a positive test so that there are no error messages displayed. After getting the scenario, we can perform invalid entries and test the application.

After entering the URL and hitting Enter in the Address bar you can see the page loaded on the right and the request is captured on the left.

Enter all request details and then click on the Register button. As soon as the web page is submitted, we can see the second request captured by the recorder with the details and shown in the tree view.

We had two requests during the recording—one for page display and the other for submitting the page or registering the details. The details of these requests are displayed in the tree view. If you expand the second root node in the tree view, you can find different values or strings passed by the web application by clicking Register button captured under the folder Form Post Parameters. You can also notice the event that took place by clicking the Register button in the web page. All other details are the parameter values posted by the request.

Below the Register button is the Login section. Here the user can enter the credentials and go to the My Orders section where user orders are displayed. This is a redirected request from the Register.aspx page to MyOrder.aspx submitted using HTTP-GET method by sending the userid in query string parameter. There are different protocols used for sending the requests: HTTP-GET, HTTP-POST, and SOAP.

• HTTP-GET: Hypertext Transfer Protocol-GET protocol appends the query strings to the URL. The Query string is the name and value pair, which created out of the parameters and data.

• HTTP-POST: Hypertext Transfer Protocol-POST protocol passes the name and value pairs in the body of the HTTP request message.

• SOAP protocol is an XML-based protocol used for sending the structured information. This is mostly used by the web services.

From the recording details you can see that only the independent requests (GET or POST) are recorded but not the dependent requests like getting the images and the other requests. These requests will be reported only when the test is run, but during recording it will not be shown or captured.

Adding comments

While recording the web page requests, we may need to add some comments about the page or the test. This comment could be any text with additional information for our reference. This is similar to the comments that we add to our code during development. Sometimes we may need to add information about the steps to follow during the test. Basically comments are to record the information about the task that we may have to do during the test but we easily forget to do. These comments can be added by just clicking the Add Comments button in the Web Test Recorder toolbar.

Cleaning the recorded tests

In the web test recording we might have requested many pages, but at the end of recording we may not need some of the requests to be part of testing. This is because we might have forgotten to stop and restart the test or we might have stopped and restarted the test at the wrong place. To remove the unwanted requests, we have to edit the recording. We should go through each recorded request and delete the requests which are not required.

Copying the requests

In some situations we may need the same requests to be tested multiple times. For example, page refresh. To simulate this, we can copy the recorded requests and place them into the recording list. We can copy the request any number of times.We need to select the request from the list in the tree view, right-click and Copy or use (Ctrl + C) and then select the destination folder and right-click and choose Paste.