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This blog covers a wide array of topics, issues and solutions related to automated testing and system administration. Those are real issues which I have encountered during my career as a test automation engineer on different projects that use different technologies. I hope you find my blog useful.
Recent posts

Waiting for values to finish loading on the page with WebdriverIO

There are many automated tests where you have to wait for certain fields to finish loading actual values on the web page before proceeding to the next verification point. You can see an example of such test below. At first, let’s implement a new method of the OrderPage class (we use a very simple page-object model here). This class also includes another method to open the page and element locators as getters. browser is a global WebdriverIO object that allows you to interact with the pre-initialized web browser of your choice. I used “wdio-chromedriver-service” to start Google Chrome, but you can use a different service. waitForMarketValuesToLoad method is waiting for the required fields to load the real values which are not the dashes (-). As you could probably guess, the dashes are loaded immediately upon opening the page and then the real values slowly start to appear, it can take several seconds to load values in those 4 fields. You can also add regular expressions to check

Integrating TestRail and Gitlab CI/CD

Perhaps you are using Gitlab CI/CD at your project. Every project requires some test cases for regression testing, and Gitlab actually provides this feature, but it’s only available in Ultimate version that is more expensive. TestRail is another popular platform for managing your test suite that provides way more extensive capabilities and options than Gitlab’s own test case management feature. So the chances are that you are still willing to use TestRail for your acceptance and regression testing efforts. Why not combining the best of two worlds — the flexibility of Gitlab CI/CD and rich test case management capabilities of TestRail? In the following example I’ll demonstrate how this goal could be achieved with ease. Let’s assume that we need to create a new Milestone in TestRail that contains two test runs — the one with Acceptance tests, and another one with Regression tests. The step in your .gitlab-ci.yml Gitlab configuration file would look like this: This step is reading C

How to add Coded Ignore Regions dynamically in Applitools

There is a special feature in in Applitools Eyes that's called "coded ignore regions" to handle dynamic data. It's often used in Strict mode to increase test coverage if you don't want to switch to Layout mode. You can add coded ignore regions to the screenshot like this: target = target.ignore(By.id('reg1')).ignore(By.id('reg2')).ignore(By.id('reg3')); But what if these elements are created dynamically and you don't know how many of them will appear on the page? There could be 5 elements, or maybe 100... You cannot just add them in a chain by modifying a target like that. The answer is - you have to count them first and then add them in a loop. You can see the complete solution below for JavaScript.

Accurate Word Counter for non-Latin characters in Javascript regex

There is a problem that involves Javascript and regular expressions. The JS implementation of regexp does not support Unicode properly, for example /\b\S+\b/g regular expression will not count words with Unicode characters of many national alphabets and scripts, such as Cyrillic, Greek and Hindi. Unfortunately \S is restricted to Latin-only characters of English alphabet. To solve this problem we must explicitly include all Unicode characters. My solution is to use /([\u0080-\uFFFF\w]\u0027?)+/g regular expression instead. It covers the wide range of Unicode characters (from 0080 to FFFF) that includes all national alphabets + apostrophe symbol (0027). This regex has been tested with the following sample text and it counts all 55 words accurately, ignoring all special characters and punctuation, I used https://regexr.com to test it with this sample text that includes words from several alphabets.

Switching between keyboard layouts in Openbox (Arch Linux)

Switching between two (or more) keyboard layouts in Openbox DE is a task that's quite easy to accomplish, although it might not be so obvious as in other desktop environments. This solution was tested on Arch Linux. You just need to edit this file (assuming you want to switch between English and Ukrainian Phonetic layouts with Alt-Shift): /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/01-keyboard-layout.conf Section "InputClass" Identifier "keyboard-layout" Driver "evdev" MatchIsKeyboard "yes" Option "XkbLayout" "us,ua(phonetic)" Option "XkbModel" "pc105" Option "XkbOptions" "grp:alt_shift_toggle" EndSection If you have Nvidia card, don't forget to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf and change Driver from "kbd" to "evdev" in InputDevice section: Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Keyboard0" Driver "evdev" EndSection Y

Hiding a blinking caret (cursor) on the page with Webdriver and Javascript

When you use Applitools for testing, it is important to keep all pages in the same state as they used to be when the baseline Applitools screenshot was taken. In Applitools visual difference means a bug. This is why a blinking caret (cursor) can become a problem when the baseline screenshot was taken with a caret either visible or invisible, as long as the actual screenshot was captured with a different state of the caret. We can avoid this issue if we hide the caret by making it transparent before taking a screenshot in Applitools. This is how we can do it in Selenium Webdriver (Javascript bindings) (assuming that you initialized the driver object with Webdriver).