This module abstracts away the differences between the various web-driver protocols, like the Mink
project does for PHP.
While heavily inspired by Mink, "Weasel" aims to improve over it by being extensible, providing not just
access to the underlying browser, yet to provide building blocks for further development and abstraction.
Pherkin::Extension::Weasel provides integration with Test::BDD::Cucumber (aka pherkin), for BDD testing.
For the actual page interaction, this module needs a driver to be installed. Currently, that means
Weasel::Driver::Selenium2. Other driver implementations, such as Sahi <http://sahipro.com/> can be
independently developed and uploaded to CPAN, or contributed. (We welcome and encourage both!)
Differenceswithotherframeworks
Mnemonics for element lookup patterns
The central registry of xpath expressions to find common page elements helps to keep page access code
clean. E.g. compare:
use Weasel::FindExpanders::HTML;
$session->page->find('*contains', text => 'Some text');
With
$session->page->find(".//*[contains(.,'Some text')]
[not(.//*[contains(.,'Some text')])]");
Multiple patterns can be registered for a single mnemonic, which will be concatenated to a single
xpath expression to find the matching tags in a single driver query.
Besides good performance, this has the benefit that the following
$session->page->find('*button', text => 'Click!');
can be easily extended to match Dojo toolkit's <http://dojotoolkit.org/documentation/> buttons, which
on the HTML level don't contain visible button or input tags, simply by using the widget support set:
use Weasel::Widgets::Dojo;
Widgets encapsulate specific behaviours
All elements in "Weasel" are of the base type "Weasel::Element", which encapsulates the regular
element interactions (click, find children, etc).
While most elements will be represented by "Weasel::Element", it's possible to implement other
wrappers. These offer a logical extension point to implement tag-specific utility functions. E.g.
"Weasel::Widgets::HTML::Select", which adds the utility function "select_option".
These widgets also offer a good way to override default behaviours. One such case is the Dojo
implementation of a 'select' element. This element replaces the select tag entirely and in contrast
with the original, doesn't keep the options as child elements of the 'select'-replacing tag. By
using the Dojo widget library
use Weasel::Widget::Dojo;
the lack of the parent/child relation between the the select and its options is transparently handled
by overriding the widget's "find" and "find_all" methods.
PageObjectarchitecturepatternsupport
The functionality to encapsulate behaviours in widgets, enables intuitive integration of the Page Object
architectural pattern
<https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/test_practices/encouraged/page_object_models/> for design of test
code. This pattern allows reduction of test code due and separation of concerns between the functional
test and the page interaction.