Gherkin and Robot Framework
Greetings! They say all good things must come to an end, and with this post, so it is with my series of posts covering Robot Framework.
This post builds on what was covered in previous posts. If you haven't checked out the other posts in the series, please do.
Robot Framework and Gherkin
In the last post we built a Robot test to validate some functionality of the ToDo app. The test accessed the ToDo page, added a ToDo, and verified it was successfully added. (The repo for the app and the tests can be found here).
This is what our current Robot test looks like:
1***Test Case***
2Add a new ToDo item
3 Open Browser ${URL} ${BROWSER}
4 Page Should Not Contain Element //section[@class='main']
5 Input text class: new-todo Finish This Blog Post
6 Press Keys class: new-todo RETURN
7 Page Should Contain Element //section[@class='main']
8 ${actual_count}= SeleniumLibrary.Get Element Count //ul[@class='todo-list']/li
9 ${expected_count_number}= Convert To Number 1
10 Should Be Equal ${expected_count_number} ${actual_count}
There are at least a couple issues with this test:
- Page locators are not reusable. Following this pattern, if I wanted to create another test (or 100 tests) that needs the count of ToDo items, I would probably just copy/paste that locator,
//ul[@class='todo-list']/lievery time I needed it. A better strategy would be to define the locator in a single place. If the locator ever needs to change, I have one place to go to make my update. - To my eyes, the test is hard to read. This is a pretty basic test, but It's not super clear what's going on. Also, this pattern requires knowledge of the Robot syntax. Product owners and BAs are not going to be interested in reading this, and probably no one else will be either.
Let's address these 2 issues.
As a reminder, this is what that test is actually doing:
- open the ToDo page
- verify there are no ToDos
- add a ToDo
- verify the ToDo text matches what was added
- verify there is 1 ToDo
I want my test to look a lot like this, without all the implementation details in my way.
Gherkin and Robot Framework
In the real world, the above is a good example of an acceptance test. It defines some basic functionality and describes how the application should react. Automating the testing of the requirements is useful as a component of Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD). I usually see this go hand-in-hand with BDD and the gherkin syntax. In that example our gherkin-syntax test could look something like this:
1When the User accesses the Home page
2Then the ToDo count is 0
3When the user enters new ToDo learn Robot
4Then the ToDo item is added to the to the list learn Robot 1
5And the ToDo count is 1
So how does Robot Framework facilitate our ability to write tests like this?
First of all, remember Robot is a keyword-driven framework. The first line of our test When the User accesses the Home page is just a keyword to Robot. As discussed in previous posts, we can easily hide the implementation details of this keyword in a Robot resource file. Defining this keyword in a resource file could be as simple as:
1*** Keywords ***
2the User accesses the Home page
3 Open Browser http://localhost:8888 chrome
Here I have created a custom keyword the User accesses the Home page, which uses the built-in keyword Open Browser. Note that my custom keyword does NOT begin with the word When. That's because if no match is found for the full keyword, Robot will ignore the prefixes "Given", "When", "Then", "And", "But" . This allows Robot to easily facilitate our ability to build tests using the Gherkin syntax.
Also, since we can pass parameters with Robot keywords, we're doing that with the step When the user enters new ToDo learn Robot. We are passing the text of the ToDo, "learn robot". The implementation of that step in the resource file can look something like this:
1*** Keywords ***
2the User enters new ToDo
3[Arguments] ${todo_to_enter}
4Input text class: new-todo ${todo_to_enter}
5Press Keys class: new-todo RETURN
The full resource file, including other examples, can be found here, with the gherkin test here.
To run these tests, just be sure to first start the app locally (npm start). If you can't open the app manually, the Robot test won't be able to either.
Wrap-up
So that's it. We had 2 goals for cleaning up that test:
- facilitate reuse
- make it readable
With reusable and parameterized gherkin steps, I feel we've accomplished our goal:
1When the User accesses the Home page
2Then the ToDo count is 0
3When the user enters new ToDo learn Robot
4Then the ToDo item is added to the to the list learn Robot 1
5And the ToDo count is 1
I hope this series of posts has helped someone learn more about Robot Framework. Of course I have barely scratched the surface, and the links below should help you continue your Robot journey!
Links
