Add tests classes to Login dialog (and others)

Feature Requests
1

I’ve been using Selenium to automate some end-to-end tests, and had to do some funky XPATH locaters to automate typing an email and password into the built-in login dialog and then clicking the Login button. It would be super helpful if all the built-in UIs had testing classes on all their elements for making locating them easier.

1 Like
2

You could use playwright instead of selenium and just avoid that pain entirely.

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3

I’m sure there’s some clever way that Playwright uses to select items that doesn’t require using classes or ids, but a quick glance at their front page didn’t show it. Can you share how it avoids the pain of locating the fields on the built-in login dialog?

4

Playwright uses selectors similar to jQuery, optimized for testing.

I’m on my cell now and don’t remember exactly what I do, but I remember using it with anvil apps and selecting a button by the text it contains or a textbox by its placeholder or the nth textbox in the page for example.

By default it works with an headless browser, which didn’t play nice with some features. I modified my tests so they use a visible browser, it’s slightly slower, but on the bright side it allows to interrupt the test and play around with the selector on the browser used by playwright.

5

Yeah, I’d rather not need to change my tests when cosmetic changes happen. Selecting by a class insulates me from that. It just doesn’t work on the built-in Anvil dialogs, since they weren’t built with that in mind.

6

I agree, and you can use roles or other classes part of the Anvil framework.

I do agree, but I still like to use attributes that are visible. In my experience understanding the reason of the failure and updating a test that fails because a text in a button has changed takes a few seconds, while designing solid tests takes forever, those tests are never solid anyway, and understanding that a selector stopped working because classes have changed is a pain. I like even less creating classes just for the tests, because it’s time expensive and you end up testing your tests instead of testing your app.

EDIT
I am at the computer now, here is how I test a sign in in playwright (get_secret is a helper function that gets values from a source external to the repository):

    page.fill('input[placeholder="email@address.com"]', get_secret('anvil user name'))
    page.fill('input[placeholder="password"]', get_secret('anvil password'))
    page.click(".btn-success >> text='Log In'")