Detecting state changes in Internet Explorer - windows

I'm trying to automate some tests on Internet Explorer. How can I find out if the state of the webpage being shown is changed? Is there any way to know when the page finished loading, if it changes, if it is scrolled, etc.?
I want to know how I can get this state information from another running process.

Selenium allows you to test for completion of a page load and many other events within Internet Explorer and many other web browsers. It's a tool for autmoated testing of web pages.
It allows you to write tests that perform actions and test the state of pages.
You could either look at the source for selenium and see what it's doing or just use it to do your testing.
I'm not sure how a web page would scroll by iteself in an automated test, but you could detect if the scroll Has happened by storing the window.scrollX value when the page is loaded and testing to see if the value has changed.

Basically, if you want to detect things like window scrolling in Internet explorer, you probably need your own piece of code running in the browser, like a BHO (Browser Helper Object).
There might be a way to do Event Sinking. Have a look here: http://asp.dotnetheaven.com/howto/doc/Interop/TestClient_2.aspx

Related

UiPath cannot click Chrome inspect feature "accessibility checker"

I have to automate on button "Accessibility Checker" which will come after inspecting the web page as shown in the picture. Please suggest me how to automate this as of now I am using UiPath, but that is not working (not able to select a correct Selector).
As far as I know chrome is a bit tricky since it has a lot more background updates than other browsers. So use something like IE if you can. Other than that, you can use anchor base activity with image activities. I get accurate results with that solution on cases where I am not able to use clicks.

Scraping an Angular website with selenium and C# returns the angular script, not the rendered web page

This seems to be by design as far as I can tell. Selenium can see the initially loaded HTML, but not the HTML after it's been massaged. I've tried IE, Chrome and PhantomJS and they all show the same behavior. So does the built-in Chrome debugger, until you inspect an element on the page, you can't query any of the rendered HTML.
I'm looking for any suggestions about how to scrape the web page. The only option I see right now is finding the chrome process, triggering the inspector, clicking inside, then running the Javascript. Needless to say, this sounds fragile.
I also haven't been able to find anything on capturing the Ajax calls from selenium so I can make them and capture the JSON. When tried copy / paste from the chrome network tab into selenium I got a missing application block message.
Does anyone have any other advice?
Since I can replicate the issue in the chrome debugger, I don't see posting code as useful. It looks like a design decision.
Ralph
Sadly, I wasn't able to do things in a straightforward way. Instead, I used Selenium to do the login and navigate to the page, then use windows API calls to click inside the window send ^a^c to copy the data and an absolute location to click on the button to go to the next page.
The site is set up so that ^a^c copies the raw data for this site. I don't know if that's standard for Angular or not.
Fragile, but it works.

Dynamically changing the look of a WinRT javascript app

You know when you create a web app, you can hit F12 from your browser and be able to edit things such as style sheet, remove dom elements etc. on the fly.
This makes for a quick turn around when developing a UI. A real time saver!
Otherwise there's a lot of compile, deploy and clicking click to get to the area you wanted to test. And if the area you're testing is at the end of the workflow, the pain is that much more. I find doing this to be frustratingly time consuming when all you want to do is just change the font size to make it look "better".
Is there any tool similar to that in WinRT environment? Is this just the nature of Mobile App development or is there something out there (regardless of platform) that allows you to edit the UI on the fly?
Yes, you have several options available to you.
First, Blend for Visual Studio--which is installed with Visual Studio Express for Windows--is a great styling tool. It shares the same project structure with VS, so you can have both running at the same time. In VS, in fact, right-click a project in Solution Explorer, select Open in Blend, and there you are.
Blend actually loads the app and executes the JS code, so all dynamically-created elements are also in place. It has an Interactive Mode as well that lets you go into the running app, navigate and set state as you want, then exit that mode and work on styling. For more, I have a video in my book (first edition | second edition preview) that shows the basics of Blend--you can specifically go here and check out Videos 2-2 and 5-3 from the second edition). Chapter 2 gives a little intro in the text as well.
The other two options are in Visual Studio itself.
First, when an app it running there's a command Debug > Refresh Windows Apps (F4) that will reload the HTML and CSS without restarting the app. I use this to reload changes for exactly the reasons you mention. This same command is on the toolbar just to the right of the pause/stop/restart buttons.
Second, a running app will have a DOM Explorer pane in the debugger. If you don't see it, use the Debug > Windows > DOM Explorer command to open it. In that pane you can navigate the DOM tree (like you can in Blend's Live DOM pane) and locate the elements you care about, or you can use the leftmost button in the DOM Explorer to go select and element directly in the app.
On the right side of the DOM explorer you then have tabs for Styles, Trace, Computed, Layout, and Events. You can make changes directly in the Styles pane and they're applied immediately. I use this all the time, in fact, to try out things.
I have a 2 minute video in my book for this as well, see here. Some docs are on http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/hh696632.

web browser engine to embed in win32 program

I need to put in simple Win32 program kind of ability to view web pages. It must be just window with page in it, no browser adress bars or other elements, just working web page in win32 window without any standart browser elements.
It seems that i need some kind of project, that gives me some way to embed chromium engine (chromium most likely) in to win32 api, and, obviously, give the full controls over the messages and other stuff that going to that "browser" window. I was looking at CEF project http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/ , but will it fit, or any other suggestions?
My (unfortunate) suggestion is to use IWebBrowser2 if you just want to use the Internet Explorer control.
Example can be seen here:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/16559/Launch-and-control-MSIE-using-IWebBrowser2

how to crawl web page with ajax elements

I want to crawl some web pages, like the following
http://www.youtube.com/user/koglin66/feed?filter=2
but there is a 'load more' button, it is related to an ajax request
http://www.youtube.com/channel_ajax?action_load_more_feed_items=1&activity_view=1&paging=1352148528&channel_id=UCCw8aVnsIeu9S6OPQyaQ14g
I want to crawl the whole page.
Manually, I have click on the button repeatedly until there is no more to load,
by automation, how can I crawl the whole page? thanks!
Yes, you can use Selenium IDE, or use other program/library with browser core to do click action. Like webkit, activex of IE.
And you can try FMiner http://www.fminer.com/, it can record and play human actions on browser to scrape data, but it's not free.
I recently faced same problem with other website I wanted to scrap. I use Java and after some research on the web I used Selenium IDE for firefox in which u can write Java Junit test cases which will automatically open the webpage and click buttons, fill up forms, etc.
It also supports C#,Python,Ruby,etc
I used it to click on Load More button and when the page was loaded completely after all clicks I saved it Manually.
You can download Selenium from their website and I found this youtube video useful too http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twdDfDOrHC4

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