Extending Geb Navigators to work with Third Party Javascript Libraries

In Asgard, we use the select2 jQuery library to make combo boxes on our pages more user friendly.

This causes a problem when writing functional tests, however, since you cannot use the default drop down selection mechanisms provided by Geb.

A pretty powerful technique mentioned in Marcin Edrmann’s Advanced Geb talk is to extend the default navigators to provide your own methods to acommodate third party libraries.

In this post, I will show you how we use this to provide our own dropdown selection method.

Mocking out Amazon AWS SDK with the Betamax Recording Proxy for testing

One of the ways you can make your testing more efficient is to mock out external services.

If you are using Amazon Web Services in your application, you can use the Betamax proxy to record and playback responses so they are consistent across your tests.

Here is an example Spock specification on how to mock out the SDK’s http service so it plays nice with Betamax:

    @Betamax(tape = "mytape")
    void 'can use betamax to stub out amazon service'() {

        given:
        // set up an AWS client configuration that uses a proxy
        ClientConfiguration clientConfig = new ClientConfiguration()
        clientConfig.proxyHost = '127.0.0.1'
        clientConfig.proxyPort = 5555

        // configure your AWS client, here we use the SimpleDBClient as an example
        AmazonSimpleDBClient simpleDbClient = new AmazonSimpleDBClient(
            new BasicAWSCredentials('accessKey', 'secretKey'),
            clientConfig
        )
        
        // setup the betamax proxy on the AWS SDK's httpClient
        BetamaxHttpsSupport.configure(simpleDbClient.client.httpClient)

        when:
        // now, when a request is made, the test will first check on the betamax tape to see if it has been previously recorded.
        SelectResult result = simpleDbClient.select(new SelectRequest("select * from MYRESOURCELIST limit 20", true))
        
        then:
        result.size() == 20
    }