While working on our unit test framework, I wanted to write a function that checks if a given Ext JS windoid is opened. The function should accept a title argument. This was easily implemented as:

	# title is a string with the exact windoid title
	def windoidDisplayed?(title)
		spans = $browser.spans
		t = $browser.length && $browser.detect {|i| \
			i.class_name == 'x-window-header-text' \
			&& title == i.text \
		}
		return t && t.visible?
	end

I then realized that users might not have the full title of the window, and might only want to check for a windoid with a title that matches some regular expression. A simple and naive way to do it is

	# title can be a string or a regular expression
	def windoidDisplayed?(title)
		spans = $browser.spans
		t = $browser.length && $browser.detect {|i| \
			i.class_name == 'x-window-header-text' \
				&& (title.kind_of?(String) \
					? (title == i.text) \
					: (title =~ i.text)) \
		}
		return t && t.visible?
	end

However, I didn’t want to check in every loop iteration if the passed title argument is regular expression. Although performance is really a non-issue in our unit tests, it just seemed to be a cumbersome and ugly code. I thought of using the dynamic nature of ruby to add a method (e.g. “match?”) to both string and regular expression classes, so I can call it in a polymorphic way without having to detect the type of title:

	class String
		def match?(x)
			return self == x
		end
	end

	class Regexp
		def match?(x)
			return self.match(x)
		end
	end

	# title can be a string or a regular expression
	def windoidDisplayed?(title)
		spans = $browser.spans
		t = $browser.length && $browser.detect {|i| \
				i.class_name == 'x-window-header-text' \
				&& title.match?(i.text) \
		}
	return t && t.visible?

Before implementing it, I thought I’d check if a similar function already exists in Ruby’s Standard Library, and indeed, when I looked up the Ruby book for functions that are in both String and Regexp classes, I run into “===” (the Case Equality operator), which is meant exactly for this kind of things. Unlike JavaScript, where the === operator is meant for identity, in Ruby, the === method is usually called in case expressions to match the case target for each when clause. As said in the documentation, for the String class, === method tests for equality and is the same as ==, but for Regexp class, === method tests for matches, and is the same as =~. Exactly what I was looking for. So my little function can simply be implemented like:

	# title can be a string or a regular expression
	def windoidDisplayed?(title)
		spans = $browser.spans
		t = $browser.length && $browser.detect {|i| \
				i.class_name == 'x-window-header-text' \
				&& title === i.text \
		}
		return t && t.visible?
	end

BTW, while searching for that, I took a look at Watir’s sources, hoping to learn from the experts as I’m new to Ruby.
I found that Watir source (watir.rb, lines 50-70) does a similar trick to what I initially thought to do – define a new “matches” method (and not “match?” like the ruby convention that is also used in Watir in methods like “exists?” and “visible?“), and don’t use the === method.
In addition, in several places in the code there are still explicit tests for String class, such as the verify_contains method in input_elements.rb and navigate_to_link_with_id and navigate_to_link_with_url methods in watir_simple.rb.

When I started building a unit tests framework for our product, I decided that I want the browser to remain open through all tests, and only be closed at the end. This is because I don’t want a developer running these tests on his machine to be disturbed with many browser windows opened and closed.

However, as I quickly found out, there is no easy way to run code at the beginning and end of a test suite. This seems to be intentional, as each test case should be separate and independent of other tests in the suite. The setup and teardown methods are run for each test case.

One simple solution was to drop it and simply start the browser on every test case and close it on end, but when I played with it a little more, I reached an even better solution. I’m starting the browser at the beginning of the test and assign it to a global $browser. Then, if the test fail (which can be detected by @test_passed), we set $browser to nil, so the browser window remains, and subsequent tests create and use a new browser window. If the test succeed, the browser window is reused through $browser. At the end of the test, we close the browser if $browser is not nil. With this constellation, after the test suite finishes running, we have a browser open for each failed test, so we can inspect what went wrong and how the application looks at the time of the fail.

Here is the code I used to implement it:

# cleanup on close
END { # close browser at completion of the tests
	$browser.close if $browser && $browser.exists? && !ENV['DONT_CLOSE_BROWSER_AT_END']
	Watir::IE.quit
} 

module MyTestSuite < Watir::TestCase
	#############################################################
	# setup method:
	# This setup function is called by the UnitTest framework before any test is run.
	# The function initialize the global $browser object if needed
	#############################################################
	def setup
		return if $browser
		$browser = Watir::IE.new
		$browser.speed = :fast
		$browser.add_checker(PageCheckers::NAVIGATION_CHECKER)
		$browser.maximize unless ENV['DO_NOT_MAXIMIZE_BROWSER']
	end

	#############################################################
	# teardown method:
	# This teardown function is called by the UnitTest framework after any test is run.
	# The function reset the global $browser object in case an error
	# occurred (unless NO_NEW_BROWSER_ON_ERROR), so
	# a new browser window will be created in case an error occurred.
	#############################################################
	def teardown
		$browser = nil unless @test_passed || ENV['NO_NEW_BROWSER_ON_ERROR']
	end 

	# ... test cases methods goes here
end

Our product doesn’t have unit tests. There, I said it. For a long time I’ve been looking for a way to build unit tests. There are three factors that prevented me to do so until now:

1. It seems not to be really needed. When testing is needed, developers go over an installation and check that everything is working. Building a suite of tests to test all possible scenarios seems to be a huge task that doesn’t worth the effort.
2. This is a web application that is constantly changing, so it seems hard to write robust test that will not break on every change. In addition, it uses a session ID that is passed in the URL, so URLs are different on every run.
3. The data keeps changing. Our data is on the mainframe, and it is owned and used by other teams so we can’t expect to have the same data all the time, which makes it problematic to build solid tests.

In the past I tried using Selenium, but never really fell in love with it, and never got the time to deeply look into it and test it.
Recently I saw Ofer’s post about Watir and decided to take a better look at it and see if we can use it. Since I’m fluent at Javascript, and had a recent experience with Perl working on an installation automation project for a few months, catching Ruby was quite easy. As Ofer observed, Ruby seems to be a really nice language, but I have some problems adapting to Watir. For example, it took me sometime to understand how Javascript code can be invoked from Watir, but now I know it is done using:

$browser.ie.Document.parentWindow.execScript(js_expression)

At first, since I come from normal OO languages, I thought of creating a base ProductUnitTest class that derives from Watir::TestCase, and then, for each version or fix pack, we will create a VersionXXUnitTest class that will derive from ProductUnitTest. However, this doesn’t work well, since Test::Unit looks for all the included classes that derived from Test::Unit::TestCase, and since we would have to require ProductUnitTest in order to derived from it, Test::Unit will see two such class and will run the tests in ProductUnitTest twice – once for ProductUnitTest, and once for the derived VersionXXUnitTest.

Checking further, I came to the idea I have to use Ruby’s mixins, which is somewhat similar to Java’s interfaces, but more comfortable and easy to use, since Ruby is a dynamic language. So now, I define all basic tests and helper methods (like setup and teardown – see next post for more details on this) in a module named ProductUnitTest, and then, for each version, I define a VersionXXUnitTest class that derive from Watir::TestCase, and then includes ProductUnitTest so all the tests (and helper methods) are there, but only invoked once, for VersionXXUnitTest.

To conclude, Watir seems like a very nice framework to test our web application, and this will probably solve problem #2 above. I plan to broaden its use when we start building our next fix pack, where we have specific things we need to fix, and whenever we fix something, we should write a unit test for it right away. This is easier then writing and maintaining unit tests for an entirely new version that keeps changing. I hope that once our developers get used to it and see how it can help integration and acceptance tests they will see its value and overcome problem #1 above. I still need to find a good way to bypass problem #3.

I already showed what I did to Amit from QA, and she really liked it and said it might be useful for them as well.

P.S.
Another nice benefit of learning Ruby is that now I better understand some of the design made by the Prototype team members, which were clearly thinking in Ruby, as they are using Ruby on Rails.

Today I wrote a mail to someone and wanted to add several links. It always annoyed me that Office’s Add Hyperlink is so bloated it takes sometime to open, and even more time to switch back to it from another application, where all I wanted was to make the selected text link to the URL I had in my keyboard. So I set out to write a macro that did it.

Since Outlook has no macro recorder, I started searching the Outlook Object Browser and revealed that there is no method to add a hyperlink or to get the content of the clipboard. So I borrowed the “Getting clipboard content” functionality from a VBS script I have, and I turned to Word to record a macro that adds a hyperlink to the selected text. Once I had this Word macro, I found out I can use ActiveInspector.WordEditor to issue the Word macro I created.

The final macro result is this:

Public Sub AddLinkFromClipboard()
    If ActiveInspector.EditorType = olEditorText Then
        MsgBox "Can't add links to textual mail"
        Exit Sub
    End If
    Dim objHTM As Object
    Dim ClipboardData As String
    Dim doc As Object
    Dim sel As Object
    Set objHTM = CreateObject("htmlfile")
    ClipboardData = objHTM.ParentWindow.ClipboardData.GetData("text")
    Set doc = ActiveInspector.WordEditor
    Set sel = doc.Application.Selection
    doc.Hyperlinks.Add Anchor:=sel.Range, _
        Address:=ClipboardData, _
        SubAddress:="", _
        ScreenTip:="", _
        TextToDisplay:=sel.Text
End Sub

In various areas in the sidebar, when there is not enough space for a string, ellipsis is used, but when I hover over it with my mouse, I expect to see a tooltip showing me the entire string, so I don’t have to make room for it to see what the string is. This is common UI pattern, which is missing in Xobni.

Sample for such problems can be see in panes titles (such as “People connected to…”, “Conversation with…”), messages subjects and some more.

Xobni makes excessive use of “what’s this” tooltips at the upper part of the sidebar, explaining each of the items, and also when the links for a person (”schedule time with…”, “e-mail…”) are truncated in a narrow sidebar, the tooltip shows their full text, but that’s less important. The count in the end of a pane title, or a message’s full subject is much more important, and for this, Xobni fail to show tooltips.

Xobni will only let you store one phone number per person. But what if someone has a work number, home number and a cell phone, and you decide what to use based of his daily schedule and the time of the day?

It would be very convenient to be able to assign several number to a person, and then, when this person is displayed in the Xobni side bar, all his numbers would be displayed, and you could choose what to use.

Another problem with person contact is that when you edit it and add a number, you loose the information Xobni collected from e-mails, so if you added a picture for a person, or mistakenly set a phone number for him, you have no way to ask Xobni to use the person contact details it gathered from e-mails.

There should be an option to tell Xobni to revert back to use data from e-mails, and also there should be a way to edit this information or to add data like picture without affecting this information.

Although they bragged about adding right-click menu to the sidebar, I still miss having all the options from the relevant Outlook menu when I right click a message, a contact or an attachment.

For example -

• If I see an attachment in the Xobni bottom panel, I’d like to be able to save it to a file.
• If I see someone name in the people pane, I’d like to be able to open it’s related Outlook contact.
• If I see a message I’d like to be able to move it to a different folder (and also to know what folder it is currently in, but this is something for a separate post…)

It looks like Xobni is following Google in many ways. The recent Gmail-like invitation is an obvious example.

The problem is that they also follow Google line of “we know better than you how our software should behave, so we won’t let you configure anything” (I already ranted about it here and there).

So currently, Xobni doesn’t let you control what PST or folders will be indexed, and what times index should not work as you want your Outlook to be more responsive, etc.

It also doesn’t show you the current index status, so you don’t know if it finished going over all your mail, and I’m still not fully convinced about it’s search capabilities, and when I want to find something in my e-mail for sure, I still turn to X1. X1 also enables me to have advanced search such as all the e-mails sent by me which have “Xobni” in their subject. This can many times come handy, where just searching for “Xobni” isn’t good enough, as it brings too many results.

Xobni can really use an Advanced Search option

Well, here is my first post in a series of Xobni feedbacks. They have no meaningful order - it’s just the way I found them and had the time to put them as a post.

The Xobni sidebar puts data in categories. These categories’ titles can be partially hidden if the sidebar is too narrow. It would be nice if hovering over the title would show the entire title text in tooltip like one would expect, e.g. like it is in Outlook folder tree or messages list. When a text is not fully displayed, hovering over it should show a tooltip.

This will enable me to easily see how many people Xobni sees as related to someone, without having to widen the Xobni sidebar to see the entire title of the “People Connected” section.

Currently, it seems tooltips are only used in Xobni to explain some fields in the person details area.

I recently came by several new neat tools:

del.icio.us Bookmarks (Firefox extension)

Evgeny asked me if I know of a way to synchronize his browser’s hierarchal bookmarks with his Google tagged bookmarks. I recommended him switching to del.icio.us, knowing that such a popular site must have a synchronizing extension. A little search revealed that after Yahoo purchased del.icio.us, they wrote a extension to do exactly what I looked for, and it seems to work extremely well.

One of the main benefits of the extension to me is the option to bookmark an opened Firefox tab while offline, counting on the extension to later synchronize it to del.icio.us when I’m back online.

The only problem is that I have used many, many tags, and this translates to a very long Tags menu. Obviously, the guys at Yahoo thought about it, and added the Favorite Tags feature, but still, if I look for a tag not in my favorites list, it can be annoying. I really need to clean up my list of bookmarks, but that’s not related to the del.icio.us Bookmarks. It would be better, though, if they could put the list of tabs in multiple-columns menu, like the programs menu in Windows’ Start menu, but I don’t know how easy it is to do it in a Firefox extension.

Miranda IM

When I first realized I use several IM clients, and could use one tool that will aggregate them all, I started using Meebo, especially as I was impressed with the Web and AJAX abilities they demonstrated. But then I realized I prefer a non-browser solution, which will not depend on my browser (which is an important working tool for me), and will show me tray notification on events. I picked Pidgin which looked nice.

But recently  I realized I’m having too many problems with it. It didn’t do Hebrew spell checking, it often got stuck while writing messages, it didn’t display Hebrew properly with talking with my boss via MSN, and some more. I started looking again, and found Miranda. Miranda look very nice, and it seem to have a plugin for anything I could think I need. I especially liked the SMS plugin which sends SMS via ICQ for free I so liked it, I recommended it to friends, and even installed it on my wife’s machine, so she can use it for sending SMS (thought she is still using Google Talk for chatting).

The only current problem is that Miranda doesn’t handle Hebrew spell checking well as well. I posted something about it. I hope it will sometime be fixed.

Xobni

When I saw the Xobni video I fell in love and signed up to their closed beta. I recently got an invitation to the beta and started using it. Surprisingly, It doesn’t slow down my Outlook and seems to work very well. I do have some complaints, but because it is too long, I’ll post them in separate posts.

Fireshot (Firefox extension)

I don’t use Nitobi’s products, but after reading Alex’s explanation of how he built the FishEye widget, I subscribed to his blog which sometimes have interesting ideas or links. He recently posted about the Fireshot Firefox extension for taking screenshots from the browser. There are many screen capturing programs, and my favorite is  MWSnap, but his extension allows you to easily edit the captured image - crop and blur areas, add annotations etc. I even used it to open an image captured outside of the browser with MWSnap, by opening the image in Firefox and re-capturing it, just for the editing.

The only problem I’m currently having with it doesn’t have an Undo feature, which means that if you made a mistake in your editing of the captured image, you have to re-capture and start all over again.