Selenium and Ajax Requests

Following Lance Ivy's excellent post (http://codelevy.com/articles/2007/11/05/selenium-and-ajax-requests), here's an easy way to write Selenium tests for Ajax requests when you're not using Prototype directly, but using Ajax4JSF or RichFaces.

Add this to your user-extensions.js:

/**
 * Registers with the a4j library to record when an Ajax request
 * finishes.
 *
 * Call this after the most recent page load but before any Ajax requests.
 *
 * Once you've called this for a page, you should call waitForA4jRequest at
 * every opportunity, to make sure the A4jRequestFinished flag is consumed.
 */
Selenium.prototype.doWatchA4jRequests = function() {
 var testWindow = selenium.browserbot.getCurrentWindow();
 // workaround for Selenium IDE 1b2 bug, see
 // http://clearspace.openqa.org/message/46135
 if (testWindow.wrappedJSObject) {
   testWindow = testWindow.wrappedJSObject;
 }
 testWindow.A4J.AJAX.AddListener({
  onafterajax: function() {Selenium.A4jRequestFinished = true}
 });
}

/**
 * If you've set up with watchA4jRequests, this routine will wait until
 * an Ajax request has finished and then return.
 */
Selenium.prototype.doWaitForA4jRequest = function(timeout) {
 return Selenium.decorateFunctionWithTimeout(function() {
  if (Selenium.A4jRequestFinished) {
   Selenium.A4jRequestFinished = false;
   return true;
  }
  return false;
 }, timeout);
}

Selenium.A4jRequestFinished = false;

Instead of using pauses or waitForCondition (writing some esoteric javascript test to detect that the Ajax call ended), you can then write something as simple as:

<tr>
 <td>watchA4jRequests</td>
 <td></td>
 <td></td>
</tr>

... (command triggering the ajax call) ...

<tr>
 <td>waitForA4jRequest</td>
 <td>10000</td>
 <td></td>
</tr>
</pre>

For Selenium beginners, the Javascript code has to be placed in a file named user-extensions.js and passed as an attribute to the Selenium Server command line option "-user-extensions <file>". When using Selenium IDE, it can be set in the options menu (don't forget to close the IDE and restart it for this to be taken into account).