Selenium onLoad() handling

At APT, we’ve recently completed a transition to using Selenium’s Java RC¹ for our regression testing framework. One of the excellent things about Selenium RC is the ability to add functionality with relative ease.

In this entry, I want to briefly cover how we get around the onLoad() event caveat of Selenium. Since Selenium works by Javascript injection, it is unable to catch onLoad() events, which can prove to be troublesome when dialog boxes are hit onLoad(). Our code base is relatively large for such a small company and in testing we are really pushing the limits of Selenium. Our goal is to have all of our front-end testing done through Selenium, which means that it needs to elegantly handle Javascript errors and onLoad confirmations/alerts.

When executing an action such as click(), Selenium can hang if a Javascript error is hit. In order to handle this, we now spawn a separate thread to handle any action that might alter the state of the page. The main thread is then able to poll and check if the action thread has hung and if it has we call an AutoIt script² which closes the dialog box and logs an error to our database. This is especially powerful because it lets our tests continue to run with virtually no human interaction.

By leveraging anonymous classes in Java, any Selenium function can quickly be overloaded and run in a custom multithreaded execution thread, as well as make any encountered errors available for the main thread to handle.

This is just an example of how we are automating Selenium, which is crucial in order for it to work with our distributed framework. In my next blog entry I would like to cover how we are accomplishing quick distributed compilation.

- Dan Hackner

1 – http://seleniumhq.org/projects/remote-control/

2 – a Window’s GUI level scripting language. http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/

Why am I getting a SyntaxError when trying to start Apache after adding the PHP module?

This one was a killer to figure out and I can't believe I couldn't find the answer with Google. I just installed Apache 2.11 and PHP 5.2.8. Both worked independent of each other, but when I tried to add the PHP module to Apache, it wouldn't start. Specifically, I added:


LoadModule php5_module "c:/path/to/php/php5apache2.dll"
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps


to the httpd.conf file. This was what every set of setup instructions said to do. When I originally tried to fire up Apache as service, it couldn't start. To get some information about the error I tried to start it from the command line. This is probably obvious to most, but you can of course run the web server from the command line. Something like:


>>> c:\Program Files\Apache\bin\httpd.exe


ought to do the trick. Obviously, if you install it elsewhere, replace the relevant parts of the path.

Anyway, I ran it from the command line and got the terrific error message:


Syntax error in line 128 of C:/Program Files/Apache/conf/httpd.conf: Cannot load c:/path/to/php/php5apache2.dll in to server: The specified module could not be found.


It's a little misleading that it says "SyntaxError" because I then spent about 15 minutes trying to figure out if I had a typo somewhere. When I finally started Googling around, I quickly realized the important part of the error message was the last sentence.

To make a long story short, I finally was tipped off by the fact someone mentioned using Apache 2.0.x instead of Apache 2.2 to solve the problem. Ah ha! If you look in the PHP installation directory, there is a suspicious DLL named php5apache2_2.dll. I switched my httpd.conf to use that one instead, and bingo. We're in business.

Like my last post, hopefully this helps someone else stuck in this situation. I had a feeling there might be something about different versions of Apache when I was downloading it and my options were 2.11 and 2.0.63. I didn't notice any discussion of what the big differences were on the Apache site, but apparently there are some. Feel free to leave a comment about the main differences between the versions if you know.

After I install Apache, why am I forbidden from hitting any page in my webroot?

Now there are a lot of possible answers to this question, but I searched Google for quite some time looking for answers. Everyone mentioned checking the permissions on the folder, which is good advice, you should start there. But I don't know much about permission and everything seemed to look okay and still nothing. Since I was migrating from IIS to Apache, I already had my webroot setup to work with IIS and that worked fine, so I was a bit at a loss for what was wrong. Well, the problem I had at least ended up being in the httpd.conf file. Of course I had changed my DocumentRoot to:

DocumentRoot "C:/www"

but it turns out there is another place in the httpd.conf where you need to update the webroot about 30 lines down. There was a nice comment above the code that said it needed to be changed, so this is yet another reason to at least skim through the configuration file. Anyway, I edited that line and voila, everything works. Here in the line I edited along with the comment above it:


#
# Note that from this point forward you must specifically allow
# particular features to be enabled - so if something's not working as
# you might expect, make sure that you have specifically enabled it
# below.
#

#
# This should be changed to whatever you set DocumentRoot to.
#
<Directory "C:/www">


Here's to hoping this saves someone some time and also a reminder to read through the configuration or ini files once. Yes, it's tedious and often boring, but you always learn something and it can keep you from wasting an hour like I did.

Also, if anyone is wondering, I'm running Apache 2.11. It's probably a good idea to search through the httpd.conf file for references to "htdocs" since that's where the default webroot is located in case future versions include references to your document root elsewhere.

War rooms!

APT wants their new recruits to pick up things fast. Very fast. A small company needs to keep progressing and there isn't too much time to get everyone up to speed.

So how does someone who has never even typed any html or “public static void main” cope with this situation when they join?

APT's solution = the war room. The “war room” is what we’ve termed a room filled with about 5 engineers at close quarters. While this may sound unappealing at first, it is actually awesome to have your team mates right by you. Nothing beats learning by example, and even learning by osmosis by overhearing conversations among other engineers.

Having ready and willing help literally right by your side rapidly accelerates the learning of new engineers as they never have to spin their wheels waiting for assistance when they get stuck. You can get someone to look at your code with a yell, a nudge or the highly effective throw of a stuffed gorilla (because most people listen to music at work and might not hear you yell).

It is a fun and exciting environment to learn in and if you like cooperation and team work, you'd much rather have this that a lot of space and your own private office. In fact, our Senior VP of Engineering leaves his own office empty so that he can join the rest of his team members in one of our war rooms.