I have a form that normally works with respect to dirtyforms. However, there is one circumstance where a jquery-ui datapicker calendar will pop up the "are your sure" dialog when a date is clicked.
I emphasize that this normally works correctly. The situation is related to the initial conditions of the form data source. Things work when the object being referenced is existing, but not if it is new. So I am sure somewhere there is a difference in the initial conditions of the form. But in theory the form should be identical.
How can I find what is causing the popup so I can fix my issue?
Well, I did find what was causing my problem by comparing the HTML of the working and non-working situations. (Not an easy task since there were many non-relevant differences.)
Seems that the original coder did a strange thing. Left out some Javascript function declarations when the page was "new" but of course did not eliminate the calls on those functions.
So I guess that the javascript errors were the root cause. At least when I include those function declarations everything works correctly.
By default, most anchor links on the page will trigger the dialog. We don't have a hard-coded selector of all potential 3rd party widgets, you must manually take inventory of whether these widgets use hyperlinks and ignore them if they are causing errant behavior.
See ignoring things for more information.
I was unable to reproduce this behavior using Dirty Forms 2.0.0, jQuery UI 1.11.3, and jQuery 1.11.3. However, in previous versions of Dirty Forms, you can probably use the following code to ignore the hyperlink clicks from the DatePicker.
$('.ui-datepicker a').addClass($.DirtyForms.ignoreClass);
Related
Alright, in my web application there's a dropdown that UFT picks up as a 'WebElement' instead of a 'WebList'. The options available in this dropdown are all just 'divs' and the data within the div is dynamic. Has anyone had to deal with this before? I even tried using the absolute xpath within the object repository, but that seems to be inconsistent. Whenever I run my test the first time it interacts with the dropdown it will wait the entire object sync timeout before selecting the element. Then I have it going back to select another item from the dropdown and it goes instantly. This isn't the approach I want to take with this as the abs xpath could break at any time. I've been reading blog posts etc from as far back as 2008, and tried every person's suggestion but I can't reliably click a dropdown and select something. I can give more detail if needed, but any help here would be appreciated.
When UFT waits the object synchronization timeout and then succeeds to perform the action it's usually because it has been using smart identification. Look in the report to see if this is the case (or just disable smart identification and see what happens).
If this is the case, you should try to fine-tune the description to succeed on the description and not resort to smart identification.
I got it! This behaviour was being caused by the 'browser' being different in that part of my code. I think this happened due to some of the same items being added into the OR from different pages.
Instead of having:
Browser("Browser1").Page("Page1").WebElement("Element I want").
It was:
Browser("Browser2").Page("Page1").WebElement("Element I want").
Once this was corrected in the OR everything worked as expected.
I have a set of tabs with proper roles and attributes for accessibility support. The content that tab controls gets loaded in via ajax. But each wrapper for the content loaded in also has proper tab pane roles and attributes.
The problem is, when I run an automated audit using Chrome Accessibility Tools, the test fails stating that the corresponding ID of the tab pane is missing for all of the tabs except the one that's currently active (because that wrapper with ID has been loaded). The exact error states: "ARIA attributes which refer to other elements by ID should refer to elements which exist in the DOM."
Since the ID will exist once the tab with the corresponding aria-controls attribute is active, is this really an error? Or is this just a case of a false positive because it's an automated test and they can only do so much.
In summary, What does aria-controls do and does it really need to refer to an ID that currently exists in the DOM?
aria-controls give your assisting technology a way to move to the controlled element.
If this element is not in the DOM or can't be accessed, then yes it's an error.
The two (the element with aria-controls as well the element with the referenced id) must exist at the same time, whether at page render or via JS injection.
The DOM is parsed by the UA/AT combo before the user even gets to the control or your script fires to make it exist. If you use JS injection then you need to make sure the DOM is re-parsed.
This would apply to aria-owns as well.
I don't know whether the following would work in your architecture, but it would solve the error problem:
Design the tabs so they are all in the page at the time it loads. Format those that should not be shown to be outside the viewport using absolute positioning and something like "left: -99em." Use AJAX to reset the positioning when the time has come to display the tabs. The result is that the ARIA ID dependencies will always be valid because the tabs are always part of the DOM.
The newer versions of Firefox have a new 'feature' that remembers the stuff that was filled out in a form and repopulates the form with these values on refresh (maybe in other situations as well?).
The problem is we have a quite complicated web application which uses a fair bit of ajax and hidden form fields which are never filled out by the user, but by javascript.
Because of this new 'Feature' we get a lot of errors when refreshing form because these fields are suddenly populated with invalid values.
So i'm looking for a way to turn this 'feature' off without disabling auto-completion. (because that IS useful on the fields our customers fill in)
if i put
autocomplete='off'
in my html, the effect is disabled, but this loses auto-completion (obviously).
the problem is in fields getting filled in after a refresh without any user action.
While the password manager will populate a username and password if there is exactly one match, autocomplete itself doesn't automatically populate fields. But I'm guessing you're thinking about the sort of refresh you get, say, if you reload the page. In this case the field values are restored by session history, but you might be able to turn that off by marking your page as uncacheable.
Well you should set the value of these fields to nothing or or whatever default value they have using javascript right before you start your other javascript/ajax tasks.
It is a browser feature - without going into the settings of each client browser you can't disable this.
I suggest more robust validation - client and server side.
After the page is loaded, but before you do any other logic, you should force the value to be empty:
inputElem.value = '';
Here is a jQuery solution I put together.
It doesn't disable the autofill, rather it overrides the fields after the browser has done it's thing.
I was trying to fight Chromes autofill when I made this. Just using .val('') on it's own didn't work since it triggered before chromes autofill functionality kicked it.
var noFiller = $('input[type="text"]');
noFiller.val(' ');
var t=setTimeout(function(){
noFiller.val('');
},60);//keep increasing this number until it works
The Javascript solution (setting field values to empty when the page loads or updates via Ajax) has already been mentioned.
Another option might be to generate the ids of your fields with random numbers attached to them so that the browser can't match them to cached values, but this may screw up other things.
Autocomplete isn't a new thing. Every browser has it. See this http://www.w3.org/Submission/web-forms2/#the-autocomplete
Autofill? Are you sure? Check your input's value attribute with Firebug (Firefox addon). Check you post and response in your ajax. Maybe your ajax is filling it behind scenes.
BTW: remenber to disable any external toolbar. There are some toolbars for Firefox/IE/Chrome/etc that autofill data for the user. Warning with this.
Currently, HTML5's new input types,
<input type="number"...>
<input type="email"...>
<input type="url"...>
simply focus on any offending text-boxes with mismatching user input upon form submission.
Problem: Focusing is fine. However it's a very subtle way of telling the user why the form is not submitting.
Which of these is the better solution to let the user know what's wrong:
Add css on a focused textbox by
adding a background color. It's still
slightly subtle and the user might
not immediately understand why a
particular textbox is focused.
Javascript validation (jQuery
validation plugin) for displaying error messages. In which case, I might as well use ordinary input types, and do everything here.
Suggestions are welcome!
According to good old usability heuristics:
Error prevention:
Even better than good error messages
is a careful design which prevents a
problem from occurring in the first
place. Either eliminate error-prone
conditions or check for them and
present users with a confirmation
option before they commit to the
action.
Help users recognize,
diagnose, and recover from
errors: Error messages should
be expressed in plain language (no
codes), precisely indicate the
problem, and constructively suggest a
solution.
http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html
The best choice is to clearly notify the user about the error (not only where has happened, but also why...). Above that the UI should be clear enough to prevent the user from unallowed input.
IMHO you can use JQuery for error handling, still leaving html5 types, which are "semantically" better than ordinary input types.
Make them go red.
the problem I have is that I have two sets of values in a drop down list. If type 'A' is selected I want a text box to be populated with a value from the database and be read only. If Type 'B' is selected the box is to be empty and editable.
My original code is written in jsp/struts and I have sort of achieved this by using
onchange="javascript:submit()" to reload the page, but this has the obvious drawback of saving any changes you have made which means you can't really cancel.
I also have other problems with the serverside validation due to this method.
Is there a way of making a jsp page reload on change, that way I could write javascript to change the way the page looks according to the values held in the session. That way the save/submit function will only be called when the page has properly been filled out and the server side validation will work as designed.
I know that this is something that AJAX is good at doing but I am trying to avoid it if possible.
AJAX is your only other option my friend, unless on the original page load you load all the other possible values of the Text Box so you don't need to go back to the database. Well, you could try putting the text box in an IFRAME, but you will probably run into more problems with that approach than just going with AJAX.
Without AJAX what you are asking is going to be difficult. Another option (which is ugly) is to write out all possible values for the second list box into a data structure like an array or dictionary.
Then write some javascript to get the values from the data structure when the user selects from the first list box. The amount of javascript you will have to write to get this done and to do it correctly in a cross browser way will be much more difficult than simply using AJAX.
Not sure why you'd try to avoid AJAX in today's world, the JS libraries out there today make it so simple it's crazy not to try it out.
I just had to replace a page that was written as Vincent pointed out. I assume at the time it made sense for the app, given the relative size of the data 4 years ago. Now that the app has scaled though, the page was taking upwards of 30 seconds to parse the data structures repeatedly (poorly written JS? maybe).
I replaced all the logic with a very simple AJAX call to a servlet that simply returns a JSON response of values for the 2nd drop down based on what was passed to it and the response is basically instant.
Good luck to ya.
One way is to change the form's action so that you submit the form to a different url than the "save" url. This lets you reload certain aspects of the form and return to the form itself, instead of committing the data.
<script>
function reload() {
document.forms[0].action="reloadFormData.jsp";
document.forms[0].submit();
}
</script>
<form action="saveData.jsp" method="post">
<select id="A" name="B" onchange="reload()"><!-- blah --></select>
<select id="B" name="B"><!-- blah B --></select>
<input type="submit">
</form>
If I understand you correctly, that you want either a dropdown (<select>) or a textfield (<input type="text">) depending on a choice (typically a checkbox or radiobuttons) somewhere above in a form?
I that case you may need to handle the two types of input differently on the server anyway, so why not have both the selectbox and textfield in the area of the form with different names and id and one of them hidden (display = none). Then toggle visibility when the choice changes. On the server you pick eiter the selectbox or textarea input (wich will both be present unless you disable (disabled="disabled") them too, wich I think is uneccesary) depending on the choice input.
Of course if you expect that the user usually just need the text-input, and a few times only, needing a massive list; it would be better to use ajax to retrieve the list. But if it's the other way around (you need the text-field only occationally), as I assumed above, it will be faster to have both present in the initial form.
If the drop down only contain easily generateable data, like years from now to houndreds of years back it could even be much faster (requiring less bandwidth on the server) to generate the data client side using a for loop in Javascript.
I know a taglib that can fit to your problem:
AjaxTags.
I use this taglib in my J2EE projects and it is very simple to integrate it into web applications.
This taglib give you several tags designed to execute AJAX request in your jsp files.
Here is the description of each tags: http://ajaxtags.sourceforge.net/usage.html
The tag which will help you is the ajax:select tag. It allows you to populate a select tag which depends on an other field without reloading the entire jsp page.
If you more informations about it, ask me and i'll try to answer quicky.
Along the lines of what Strindhaug said, but if you need dynamic data:
Could you have the backend write JS into the page, and then the JS would change the form as required? The backend could propagate some variables for descriptions and such, and then the JS could change/update the form accordingly. If you aren't familiar with this, libs like jQuery make things like this easier and more cross-browser than rolling-your-own (at least in my experience).
Aside:
If you're not using AJAX because it was hard to code (as I didn't for a while because my first experience was from scratch and wasn't pretty), as others have said, libs like MooTools and such make it really easy now. Also, there is not shame in using AJAX properly. It has a bad rap because people do stupid things with it, but if you can't simply write premade values into the form or you have to do live look ups, this is one of AJAX's proper uses.