Graphene 2.0.0.Alpha5 Released

Since we wrote this post we didn't laze around. Check our latest announcement.

The Arquillian team is proud to announce the 2.0.0.Alpha5 release of the Graphene component!

The last step before Beta release brings you a lot of new features.

Highlighted Changes

Deprecations in this release: With the support of the community, we have recognized that some parts of the API needs to be enhanced to achieve better clarity, readability and consistency. The old parts are deprecated in this release, and will be removed in the upcoming Beta1 release. (list of deprecations here)

Guard Improvements and Fixes: RequestGuard interface is now exposed as an API and brings new methods for filtering the requests that should be intercepted. This is especially useful in cases where your page does asynchronously communicate with a server (using Comet/Push method) which can make your tests undeterministic – the asynchronously invoked request can interfere with a request invoked synchronously (e.g. by clicking on a button) and Graphene can’t guess which request should be observed. With the RequestGuard API you can ignore the request which you’re not interested in guarding. (JavaDoc)

Support for parallel browser sessions: The Graphene context is no longer thread-local which enables parallel browser sessions. In other words; you can control two different browsers in one test. (an example here)

Page Objects can encapsulate their location: You can easily denote the Page Objects location via the @Location annotation. When used with @InitialPage annotation as a test parameter, Graphene will load that location as a first action for the test, and will also give you the initialized page object. (an example here)

Injecting elements from HTML frames/iframes: To facilitate the tedious process of switching to and from a particular frame/iframe; you can now just use the @InFrame annotation to specify in which frame the element should be located. The details are handled by Graphene. (an example here)

Page Fragments can implement the WebElement interface: If you want to give your Page Fragments all the capabilities of the WebElement interface, without implementing them youself; you can simply add implements WebElement and make your fragment abstract. Graphene will provide you with a proxy that delegates all the WebElement method invocations to your page fragment’s @Root element.

Drone enrichers for Page Fragments and Page Objects: It is now possible to inject objects into your Page Fragments and Page Objects via the standard Arquillian enrcihment annotations: e.g. @Drone to get the browser instance, @ArquillianResource to get resources like URL, JavascriptExecutor, LocalStorage or others.

Introduction of the GrapheneElement: GrapheneElement is our way of providing you with the missing methods of the WebElement interface. GrapheneElement can be used anywhere the WebElement is used. Currently the only addition is the isPresent method, but we plan to add far more in the upcoming releases.

Introduction of the @FindByJQuery annotation: This is the replacement for the deprecated @FindBy annotation. Read more about it in the deprecations section.

Drone upgraded to 1.2.0.Beta1: For more info, please see the Drone release annoucement here.

Removed

Graphene.guardXhr(): Graphene.guardXhr() was replaced by Graphene.guardAjax().

Deprecations (will be removed in Beta1)

Our implementation of the @FindBy annotation: To achieve better extendability and to avoid errors caused by mistyped package name, we decided to deprecate our implementation of the @FindBy annotation (read more). Its purpose was solely to add support for JQuery locating strategy. This is now replaced by the @FindByJQuery annotation. The main advantage of the new approach is its extensibility. Support for our own location strategies are guaranteed via LocationStrategy interface.

Package name changes for @Page and @Root annotations

org.jboss.arquillian.graphene.spi.annotations.Root replaced by org.jboss.arquillian.graphene.fragment.Root
org.jboss.arquillian.graphene.spi.annotations.Page replaced by org.jboss.arquillian.graphene.fragment.Page

Selenium 1 support: Selenium 1 support will be removed in the upcoming Beta1 release, but you can still use Graphene 1, which is built on top of Selenium 1. (Graphene 1 docs)

Parallel browser sessions

Your test can now use more than one browser session. It might be handy for testing e.g. server push functionality. Consider the following scenario:

@Browser1 
@Drone
private WebDriver browser1;

@Browser2
@Drone
private WebDriver browser2;

public void testServerPushFromFirefoxToChromeAfterRegistration() {
    browser1.get(“http://localhost:8080/myApp”);
    browser2.get(“http://localhost:8080/myApp”);

    formFragment.registerUser(new User(“John”), browser1);
    registeredUsers.assertContains(“John”, browser2);
}

The @Browser1 and @Browser2 annotations are qualifiers, similar concept as in CDI. The settings for these browsers can be set e.g. in the arquillian.xml:

<extension qualifier="webdriver-browser1">
  <property name="browserCapabilities">firefox</property>
</extension>
<extension qualifier="webdriver-browser2">
  <property name="browserCapabilities">chrome</property>
</extension>

Page Objects location encapsulated

First thing you have to keep in mind before interacting with the page is that its loading in the browser. Once the URL of the particular page changes, you will have to change it on several places in your tests.

Graphene, therefore, encapsulates the page’s location, and provide you with a way to load the page automatically on a correct context root, before the test execution.

Consider following snippet:

@Location("register-page.html")
public class RegisterPage {
    //implementation of the page object goes here
}

@Test
public void testRegisterPage(@InitialPage RegisterPage page) {
   //Graphene automatically load MyPageObject location in the browser
   page.getInput().sendKeys(“Blah foo”);
   page.submit();
   assertFalse(page.isSubmitted());
}

You can also leverage Graphene.goTo(RegisterPage.class) method, which will use the @Location annotation value to load the correct page in the browser.

Elements from frames/iframes

If you find working with frames/iframes tedious using the WebDriver API, we have some good news for you. Graphene is now able to specify in which frame/iframe an element reside. Consider the following snippet:

@Page
@InFrame(index = 0)
private PageObject page;

@FindBy(id = "foo-bar")
@InFrame(nameOrId = "second")
private PageFragment myFragment;

You can specify the frame either by its index or its nameOrId strategy. Graphene will automatically switche to the coresponding frame when interacting with the page object and switches back after the interaction.

Roadmap

We have introduced all the features for the upcoming Graphene 2.0 release.

The Beta1 release will be pushed in a few days which will bring you some more goodies:

Arquillian guide
finished reference documentation
online JavaDoc documentation for Graphene API
removal of deprecated APIs
stabilization
usual portion of bug fixes

Be sure to remove deprecated APIs in order to stay compatible with upcoming Graphene 2.0 releases.

What is Arquillian?

Arquillian is open source software that empowers you to test JVM-based applications more effectively. Created to defend the software galaxy from bugs, Arquillian brings your test to the runtime so you can focus on testing your application's behavior rather than managing the runtime. Using Arquillian, you can develop a comprehensive suite of tests from the convenience of your IDE and run them in any IDE, build tool or continuous integration environment.

Release details

Component	Graphene
Version	2.0.0.Alpha5 view tag
Release date	2013-09-03
Released by	Lukas Fryc
Compiled against	Arquillian Core – 1.1.1.Final Arquillian Drone Extension – 1.2.0.Beta1 Selenium – 2.35.0

Published artifacts org.jboss.arquillian.graphene

org.jboss.arquillian.graphene » graphene-parent pom
org.jboss.arquillian.graphene » graphene-selenium-parent pom
org.jboss.arquillian.graphene » graphene-selenium-api jar javadoc pom
org.jboss.arquillian.graphene » graphene-selenium-impl jar javadoc pom
org.jboss.arquillian.graphene » graphene-selenium-drone jar javadoc pom
org.jboss.arquillian.graphene » graphene-selenium pom
org.jboss.arquillian.graphene » graphene-webdriver-parent pom
org.jboss.arquillian.graphene » graphene-webdriver-api jar javadoc pom
org.jboss.arquillian.graphene » graphene-webdriver-spi jar javadoc pom
org.jboss.arquillian.graphene » graphene-webdriver-impl jar javadoc pom
org.jboss.arquillian.graphene » graphene-webdriver pom
org.jboss.arquillian.graphene » arquillian-graphene pom
org.jboss.arquillian.graphene » graphene-component-api jar javadoc pom

Release notes and resolved issues 32

Q3/13: SauceLabs; Context Propagation (Multiple Browsers Support); Continuous Integration

Component Upgrade

ARQGRA-323 - Update Arquillian Drone to 1.2, Arquillian Core to 1.1 and Selenium to 2.35

Enhancement

ARQGRA-236 - Made @FindBy annotation lookup mechanism extensible
ARQGRA-275 - Implement Guard observers which will filter out which request we want to intercept
ARQGRA-336 - Introduce FindByJQuery annotation

Feature Request

ARQGRA-72 - Support parallel browser sessions API for Selenium 2
ARQGRA-170 - Merge all static contexts to one (GrapheneContext)
ARQGRA-197 - Support for Page Objects encapsulating location
ARQGRA-224 - Page Fragments implementing WebElement delegate interface invocations to Root
ARQGRA-243 - Infer Graphene API from Impl module
ARQGRA-264 - Create possibility to "inject" elements from frames
ARQGRA-279 - Support for method Graphene.element(WebElement, By) and its condition isPresent
ARQGRA-291 - Provide wait until element is enabled
ARQGRA-296 - Provide a way for checking whether an element is present
ARQGRA-306 - Guards: Provide settings for customizing maximum timeout for callbacks scheduled in XHR onreadystatechange

Epic

ARQGRA-271 - The context should not be shared in static context, but propagated from the test as central point to the users (e.g. page fragments)
ARQGRA-276 - GhostDriver / PhantomJS support
ARQGRA-281 - Guard Improvements
ARQGRA-285 - Page Abstract. Improvements
ARQGRA-294 - Introduce an own implementation of WebElement

Bug

ARQGRA-274 - The request guard does timeout for delayed requests
ARQGRA-300 - Guard Ajax ends with timeout exception
ARQGRA-304 - The interceptor for handling StaleElementReferenceException is not present
ARQGRA-324 - ByChained doesn't work when jquerySelector is used
ARQGRA-327 - Graphene depends on deprecated interactions interfaces (Keyboard, Mouse, TouchScreen) removed in selenium 2.35.0

Task

ARQGRA-299 - Setup Graphene tests on SauceLabs
ARQGRA-339 - Deprecate Graphene's FindBy and How classes

Sub-task

ARQGRA-222 - Refactor page extensions to work without static context
ARQGRA-334 - Run QUnit tests manually
ARQGRA-335 - Run functional tests manually
ARQGRA-342 - Stage artifacts to Maven repository
ARQGRA-343 - Announce a release

Thanks to the following list of contributors: Lukas Fryc, Jan Papoušek, Juraj Huska, Marek Schmidt, Karel Piwko

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