Automatic web form testing/filling
- by Polatrite
I recently became lead on getting an inordinate amount of testing done in a very short period of time. We have many different web forms, using custom (Telerik) controls that need to be tested for proper data validation and sensible handling of the data. Some of the forms are several pages long with 30-80 different controls for data entry. I am looking for a software solution (that is free) that would allow me to automate the process of filling in these forms by designing a script, or using a UI. The other requirement is that I can't use any browsers but IE6 (terrible, I know).
I have previously used AutoHotkey to great success for automatic Windows form testing, since Autohotkey's API allows you to directly reference controls on the Windows form. However Autohotkey does not have similar support for web forms (everything is just one big "InternetExplorer" control).
While I would prefer that I could script some variance in the data to help serialize each test, it's not necessary, as I could go back through and manually edit a field or two (plus "break" whatever control I'm currently testing) to serialize each test.
If you've ever seen Spawner:
http://forge.mysql.com/projects/project.php?id=214
It's almost exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for (Spawner generates dummy SQL data, as opposed to dummy webform data) - but I won't be picky, I've got a really short deadline to meet and had this thrust in my lap just today. ;)
Edit1: One of the challenges of just using Autohotkey to simulate keyboard input (tabbing through controls) is that some controls don't currently have tab index (bug), and some controls cause a page reload after modification, resulting in inconsistent control focus (tabbing screwed up). Our application makes heavy use of page reloads to populate fields (select a location, it auto-populates a city, for example).
