- Posted by liammclennan on October 23, 2009
WebAii is a proprietary, but free, functional testing framework from ArtOFTest. It has become more visible since telerik started bundling it with their ASP.NET AJAX UI Controls framework.
The Good News
The Achilles heel of most web testing tools is ajax. The good news is that webaii has more support for testing ajax applications than any of the other frameworks I have tried. Methods are provided to wait for elements, or to wait for the entire page to finish rendering. To integrate webaii into your testing project requires referencing a single dll, which is also very nice.
the bad news
CSS selectors are a well designed DSL for selecting dom elements. One of the reasons why people like jQuery so much is that it uses CSS selectors to select dom elements. Webaii uses a clunky API for dom selection. It is ok for basic selectors (by id or class) but more complex queries require dropping down to a nasty low-level API.
// jQuery: $(‘#main’)
Find.ById(“main”);
// jQuery: $(‘.myclass’)
Find.ByAttributes("class=myclass");
After writing a few smoke tests I added them into our team city continuous integration build, which broke the build. ArtOfTest do provide instructions for getting the tests to run in a build but it is complicated and requires significant changes to our build.