Selenium WebDriver page object

Question

Quick question about page objects in selenium webdriver. our site is very dynamic with lots of ajax and various authentication states. It is tough to figure out how to define each page object BUT lets say I have figured that out and defined several page objects that represent our site.

How do you handle crossing from page to page. So I get a page object for my home page and one for my account page and one for my results page. Then I need to write a test that traverses all my pages to simulate a user performing multiple actions.

How do you say give me a HomePage object to create a new use -> then get a account page object to go perform some user actions - then get a result page object to verify those actions all from a single script.

How are people doing this?

thanks

Answer 1

When you're simulating having the user enter a new URL into the URL bar of the browser, then it's the responsibility of the test class to create the page object it needs.

On the other hand, when you're doing some operation on the page that would cause the browser to point to another page -- for example, clicking a link or submitting a form -- then it's the responsibility of that page object to return the next page object.

Since I don't know enough about the relationships between your home page, account page, and result page to tell you exactly how it'd play out in your site, I'll use an online store app as an example instead.

Let's say you've got a SearchPage. When you submit the form on the SearchPage, it returns a ResultsPage. And when you click on a result, you get a ProductPage. So the classes would look something like this (abbreviated to just the relevant methods):

public class SearchPage {

    public void open() {
        return driver.get(url);
    }

    public ResultsPage search(String term) {
        // Code to enter the term into the search box goes here
        // Code to click the submit button goes here
        return new ResultsPage();
    }

}

public class ResultsPage {

    public ProductPage openResult(int resultNumber) {
        // Code to locate the relevant result link and click on it
        return new ProductPage();
    }

}

The test method to execute this story would look something like this:

@Test
public void testSearch() {

    // Here we want to simulate the user going to the search page
    // as if opening a browser and entering the URL in the address bar. 
    // So we instantiate it here in the test code.

    SearchPage searchPage = new SearchPage();
    searchPage.open(); // calls driver.get() on the correct URL

    // Now search for "video games"

    ResultsPage videoGameResultsPage = searchPage.search("video games");

    // Now open the first result

    ProductPage firstProductPage = videoGameResultsPage.openResult(0);

    // Some assertion would probably go here

}

So as you can see, there's this "chaining" of Page Objects where each one returns the next one.

The result is that you end up with lots of different page objects instantiating other page objects. So if you've got a site of any considerable size, you could consider using a dependency injection framework for creating those page objects.