On Java Web Application Testing

JUnit is lovely. HtmlUnit is really nice too. Combined, they allow for quite nice automated web application testing. There are even a number of things built on top of HtmlUnit to make test cases more concise and easier to read and write. But that only as an aside.

This last weekend I have tried out HtmlUnit for the first time (wanted to do this for a while). I have integrated it with the Little Portal Gizmo to help testing Gizmo based web applications.

Below is a test class with a single test method.

public class WebTests {

    // First, the web application service is fired up (we
    // wait 500 ms after kicking it off).

    @BeforeClass
    public static void setUpBeforeClass() throws Exception {
        PortalTest.startPortal(500);
    }

    // Now the actual test...

    @Test
    public void loginLogoutGetSession() throws Exception {

        // Start off with logging the user in. This is a client-side activity:
        // get the login page, fill in the fields and click the button.

        WebClient cl = new WebClient();
        HtmlPage pg = cl.getPage("http://127.0.0.1:8080/todo");
        assertEquals("Login", pg.getTitleText());
        
        HtmlForm login = pg.getFormByName("input");
        login.getInputByName("user").setValueAttribute("jimmy");
        login.getInputByName("password").setValueAttribute("jimmy");
        
        HtmlPage loggedIn = login.getInputByName("button").click();
        
        // After successful login we now inspect the application on
        // the server and extract the session object from it that corresponds
        // to the login activity above. We can do this very easily because
        // the web application runs in the same JVM as the test code.

        ToDoSession s = (ToDoSession) PortalTest.getSessionForPage(loggedIn);
        assertEquals("jimmy", s.getUser().getName());
        assertEquals("jimmy", s.getUser().getPasswd());
        
        // Now we log out. This will remove the session from the server
        // application's session map.

        HtmlPage logout = loggedIn.getAnchorByHref("logout").click();
        assertEquals("Logout", logout.getTitleText());
        
        // Trying to get the session again will return a null reference. 

        assertNull(PortalTest.getSessionForPage(loggedIn));
    }

}

The above example of a test shows how both server side and client side are visible inside the test code and can easily be accessed. I find this very useful. What do you think? How do your tests look like?