Setting Up Flex Testing with Selenium

Recently, I was looking for tools to support automated testing for flex applications. I have a test suite in SeleniumRC and C#. I was looking for options to continue using this environment. Here’s what I found:

FlashSelenium, Selenium Flex API

These two projects provide capabilities to interact with Flex UI components and web pages through selenium RC.

Selenium Flex API automatically exposes Flex APP UI and FlashSelenium allowing us to call ActionScript methods to interact with Flex elements. Note that this approach requires us to compile our flex applications with Selenium Flex API library.

To start coding your test:

• Rebuild your Flex application with sfapi.swc add the compiler argument: -include-libraries "..\libs\sfapi.swc"
• Include FlashSelenium.dll library in the seleniumRC test project.

To be able to run test on Firefox, you need to specify the browserString *firefoxproxy instead of *firefox since Firefox doesn't like JavaScript calling Flash when JavaScript comes from another window (the way Selenium calls Flash objects).

This is a “hello world” example:

[TestClass]
public class MyAppInFlexTest
{
    private ISelenium selenium;
    private FlashSelenium.FlashSelenium flashApp;

    [TestInitialize()]
    public void SetupTest()
    {
        selenium = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, @"*firefoxproxy", 
                                        @"http://localhost/testapp.html");
        //selenium = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, @"*iexplore", 
                                          @"http://localhost/testapp.html");
        //selenium = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, @"*googlechorme", 
                                          @http://localhost/testapp.html);
        selenium.Start();
        flashApp = new FlashSelenium.FlashSelenium(selenium, "MyAppInFlex");
    }

    [TestCleanup()]
    public void TeardownTest()
    {
            selenium.Stop();
    }

    [TestMethod]
    public void TestMethodFlashSelenium()
    {
        flashApp.Call("doFlexType", "usernameTextInput", "from selenium flex");
        flashApp.Call("doFlexClick", "secureCheckBox", "");
    }
}