Verifying today's Year/Month/Day in a Web page using XPath; plus how to create a parameterized TestObject by script

Product Forums Katalon Studio
1

I have made a GitHub project:

where I described my project just for your interest. I’m not reporting any problems of KS.

Problem to solve

There is a web page http://demoaut-mimic.kazurayam.com/ demoaut-mimic

A date string 2020/5/16 is displayed in the page. I want to verify the date is TODAY. The value displayed yesterday was different from today. Tomorrow, it will be different from today. The date value displayed in the page moves.

I do not want to edit my test script to cope with the moving date value displayed, Written once, the test should pass everyday.

Solution proposed

  1. The script needs the datetime value of TODAY. I will use java.time.LocalDate class to get it.
  2. The LocalDate class provides plusDays(int n) and other convenient methods. We can calculate the date of Tomorrow ( today.plusDays(1) ) or Yesterday ( today.minusDays(1) ) just easily.
  3. Datetime value displayed in a web page is formatted in various ways. Often date display is tailored according to Locale. E.g, in Japan, I may see 令和2年5月16日. I need to format the today’s date to cope exactly with the format applied in the web page. I will use java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter to format the instance of java.time.LocalDate into a String.
  4. I will create a TestObject, which is a container of CSS/XPath selector to be passed to WebDriver, with parameter which will be interpolated with the today’s date when the test script is executed.
  5. I will use a XPath with contains() function call. I do not need matches() function here.

Description

How to run the demo

You can open “Test Cases/TC1” and run with any browser.

You will see the test passes.

Video

You can see the video. You will notice that the <span>yyyy/M/dd hh:dd:ss</span> element is addressed and highlighted with red borderline.

Test Case script

See Test Cases/TC1.

The following code fragment would be interesting.

String patternToday = CustomKeywords.'com.kazurayam.ksbackyard.DateTimePattern.today'()
TestObject tObjToday = findTestObject("span_datetime", ["ptn": patternToday])
WebUI.verifyElementPresent(tObjToday, 5)
  1. The today’s date as string (e.g., 2020/5/16 ) is resolved calling a custom keyword.
  2. The today’s date is passed to findTestObject(name, params) method call. The TestObject obtained by this call will be aware of today’ date.
  3. The WebUI.verifyElementPresent() keyword will do what it should do.

How to generate the pattern string of “Today’s date”

I wrote a custome keyword where a few lines of Groovy code generates a String of Today’s date.

Custom keyword

public static String today() {
    // Todays date
    LocalDate today = LocalDate.now(ZoneOffset.UTC)
    // Todays Day as 2 gigits. e.g, "16"
    String dayToday = today.format(DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("dd", Locale.JAPAN))
    // Todays Month as 1-2 digits. E.g, '5' as May
    String monthToday = today.format(DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("M", Locale.JAPAN))
    // Todays Year as 4 digits. E.g, '2020'
    String yearToday = today.format(DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyy", Locale.JAPAN))
    // construct the pattern to check elements with
    String patternToday = "${yearToday}/${monthToday}/${dayToday}"
    return patternToday
}

You might be surprised that the method is this lengthy and complex. In fact, this is the core part of this demo project. Generating an appropriate pattern string as Today’s date is most important when you are going to verify date in a web page because every web page has it’s own format of date and you, as a tester, have to adopt to those variations of date formats.

How the XPath is coded

You can find the definition of the TestObject [span_datetime](Object Repository/span_datetime.rs) where a XPath is written like this:

//span[contains(normalize-space(.),'${ptn}')]

The placeholder ${ptn} will be interpolated by findTestObject() method call with the today’s date like 2020/5/16 .

Please note that the XPath uses contains() function. I think that XPath contains() function is useful for most cases where people tend to think they need magical Regular Expression matches() method.

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2

One more problem to solve: how to create a parameterized TestObject by script

In the TC1, the following one line created a TestObject.

TestObject tObjToday = findTestObject("span_datetime", ["ptn": patternToday])

The source of the TestObject was named “span_datetime”, was prepared in the “Object Repsitory” with a template String

//span[contains(normalize-space(.),'${ptn}')]

The template was processed by findTestObject() method and the resulting TestObject has the xpath:

//span[contains(normalize-space(.),'2020/5/16')]

Please note that the placeholder ${ptn} was interpolated to a string 2020/5/16. This interpolation was done by findTestObject() method.

However, sometimes we do not like to create entries in the “Object Repository”. Escpecially when we need a lot of TestObjects — creating them manually is cumbersome. We may prefer creating TestObjects by script — single line of code per a TestObject.

How can I create a TestObject by script while performing interpolation of placeholders in the template string with values wanted?

Solution

I made one more demo testcase script Test Cases/TC2

TestObject tObjToday = 
	KazTestObjectFactory.createTestObject(
		'tObj',
		'//span[contains(normalize-space(.),\'${ptn}\')]',
		["ptn": patternToday])

This statement creates an instance of TestObject dynamically.

The 2nd argument is a string as template from which a XPath expression is derived. Please note that it contains a placeholder ${ptn}.

The 3rd argument is a Map object, which contains key=value pairs. The key ptn is associated with value of 2020/5/16 here.

Be sure NOT to use double quotes "..." for the template string. You MUST use single quotes '...' as you want to pass the placeholder ${ptn} as is.

I made a custom keyword com.kazurayam.ksbackyard.KazTestObjecFactory. Its createTestObject method does the magic.


public static TestObject createTestObject(String id, String template, Map params) {
		...
		// interpolate placeholders in the template with values supplied in the params
		String expr = new GroovyShell(new Binding(params)).evaluate('\"' + template + '\"')
		...
		TestObject tObj = new TestObject(id)
		tObj.addProperty("xpath", ConditionType.EQUALS, expr)
		return tObj

Here I used groovy.lang.GroovyShell and groovy.lang.Binding classes. For more informatin of these classes, see Integrating Groovy in a Java application

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