Welcome the Free Test Automation Solution for RadControls

July 06, 2009 Productivity, Testing 0 Comments

I’m happy to announce that a FREE test automation solution is now officially part of the Telerik portfolio. I’ll summarize here some of its fundamentals as well as how to get started with the WebAii Testing Framework.

First of all, it’s an extension of WebAii, the ArtOfTest’s free Web testing automation library. During the past years the framework was greatly extended and its user base/popularity grew tremendously. Now it serves as the very base of advanced test automation solutions such as ArtOfTest’s Automation Design Canvas and its Telerik brother – WebUI Test Studio. Many QAs and developers currently prefer the WebAii framework automated functional Web applications testing (ASP.NET, AJAX and Silverlight) including yours truly.

Just in case you are not familiar with the framework, let me sum up the important info (on top of my mind as well as quickly obtained from ArtOfTest.com) in a few words.

So what is WebAii?

WebAii is a free .NET cross-browser Web automation library providing rich API for elements location and action simulation. It is designed for easy automation of any Web application regardless of its complexity.

WebAii requires .NET Framework Version 3.5 and supports all Windows platforms. The list of supported browsers follows:

IE (v7 and 8)
Firefox (2.x & 3.x)
Safari on Windows (3.x and 4!)
And soon -- Google Chrome.

WebAii 2.0 Beta also supports Silverlight and Beta2 fully supports Silverlight 3!

There is no way to cover all the important capabilities in just a single post so take a look at the framework documentation for details.

WebAii RadControls

I’ve already mentioned the framework API and it is cool that it abstracts numerous Html and Xaml/Silverlight controls. So in ASP.NET there is a long list of WebAii Html controls such as WebAii Button, TextBox, CheckBox, etc. as well as anything you may need in Silverlight (including Brush, Border, Color, etc.). Just take a look at the full list from the WebAii HtmlControls and Silverlight.UI namespaces. What’s missing from these lists? That’s of course your favorite RadControls.

Well, they are now available! With Q2 2009 Telerik ships these controls as a free WebAii extension. The WebAii Testing Framework is based on WebAii version 2.0 BETA and the Q2 release is actually built on top of WebAii 2.0 Beta2 that was announced by ArtOfTest a week ago. The Q3 2009 release will finally remove the “Beta” tag from ArtOfTest’s WebAii v2.0 as well as from the Telerik extension.

Getting Started

As a first step, I’d definitely suggest reviewing the WebAii documentation especially the first articles about the framework functionality, browser configuration as well as Visual Studio Team Test or NUnit integration. Next, there is a bunch of samples that come with the WebAii installation including VSUnit and NUnit templates. You shouldn’t skip the ArtOfTest’s forums and blogs -you can surely get a lot of answers there.

The WebAii Testing Framework that you can download from telerik.com installs additional set of test samples. You will find hundreds of WebAii RadControls’ VS tests (both ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight) that run either the live ASP.NET AJAX demos or a Silverlight application extracted at installation. You just need to build the projects so that the Silverlight tests can load the examples.

Check the API reference documentation as well! While the API is definitely not completed and we will keep extending it, any requests you may have are greatly appreciated! After all, this is not just an internal product that eases our QA efforts, but a publicly shared test automation solution we encourage everyone to give a try.

How does this affect WebUI Test Studio?

Thanks for asking, my dear readers!

As pointed earlier, WebAii is the core library of Automation Design Canvas. We get the exact same relation between the WebAii Testing Framework from telerik.com and the WebUI Test Studio Advanced Click & Play Testing Automation. Actually, the RadControls Translators have been using our WebAii Html RadControls since the beginning and we did some major source code refactoring for this Q2 2009 release to get the internal WebAii controls out of the translators.

An important note – both the RadControls from the free WebAii extension and those from WebUI Test Studio (they are built against the current official version of WebAii 1.1) share the exact same API! This is really important so that one can easily upgrade from WebAii to WebUI Test Studio. This also means that the current WebUI Test Studio customers can start working on Silverlight test automation right now and later move on to the full rich capabilities of our advanced offering. I’ll be explaining this option in details in another blogpost soon.

So give the new product a try and let us know of your feedback! Also keep an eye on this blog as there is a lot more info coming out shortly.

Download the WebAii Testing Framework from your Telerik account: