November 2, 2006

WatiN and WatiNFixture

I'm sure some of you will have heard of WatiR (Web application testing in Ruby).

We'll I've recently discovered a .NET offshoot of the same (called WatiN), which suits:

  • my limited programming ability by virtue of being C# scripted (although any .NET language will work).

  • my .NET FitNesse environment


I've played around somewhat with using WatiN browser automation via VS2005 unit tests, and this works really well.
I also tried calling it via FitNesse through ActionFixtures and the like. It was cool, but a little heavy on reliance on the fixture programming.

Anyway in trawling the FitNesse forums ( http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/fitnesse/ ), I stumbled across Jeff Parker's work on a dedicated FitNesse Fixture for WatiN automation, (un-surprisingly called WatiNFixture). This allows you to create an IE instance and control the actions and validation is a key-word manner. I hit him up for the code but it was getting some polishing and was likely to come out with WatiN 9.0 :-(

WatiN release 9.0 was put out yesterday (here) sans WatiNFixture. Things are really coming together, though - Frame / iFrame support and Dialog Box handling is all in this release. WatinFixture 0.1 also launched yesterday (here) so it looks like they're collaborating rather than integrating at this stage.

Anyway if you're into test / IE automation and Fit or FitNesse check them out.