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Flex functional testing with FunFx and Cucumber

Andrea Franz — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:11:56 +0000

Cucumber is a great tool I usually use for BDD in my ruby projects, but yesterday I tried it with Flex, and it was very enjoyable. Here a little example on how to test Flex applications with Cucumber.

First of all you need ruby, then you need to install the following gems:

sudo gem install rspec cucumber watir safariwatir funfx

(I used the following codes on mac os x, with ruby 1.8.6, safari 4.0.3 and funx 0.2.2)

After that open Flex Builder and create a new project called CucumberExample and use the following code for your main mxml file:

xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute">
	<mx:Number id="index">0mx:Number>
	<mx:VBox width="300" height="200" backgroundColor="white">
		<mx:HBox width="100%" height="30">			
			<mx:Button id="buttonDecrement" label="-" width="100%" />
			<mx:Button id="buttonIncrement" label="+" width="100%" />
		mx:HBox>
		<mx:HBox width="100%" height="100%" verticalAlign="middle" horizontalAlign="center">
			<mx:Label id="myLabel" text="{index}"/>			
		mx:HBox>
	mx:VBox>
mx:Application>

As you can see, we have a number, 2 buttons and a label. Now create a directory called features inside your flex project folder and create the first Cucumber feature file, called counter:

CucumberExample/features/counter.feature:

Feature: Counter
  In order to count something
  As a flex rock star
  I want to use my great flex app
 
  Scenario: Increment index
    Given I open my flex app
    And I click the increment button
    Then the label text should be "1"
    When I click the decrement button
    Then the label text should be "0"
    When I click the decrement button
    Then the label text should be "-1"

It’s a test written in pure plain text.

In the features folder create another folder called step_definitions with a blank file called counter_steps.rb, we’ll use it later.

Now open the console, go the to flex project root and run your test:

cd /path/to/CucumberExample
cucumber features

You should see something like this:

...
1 scenario (1 undefined)
7 steps (7 undefined)
0m0.002s

You can implement step definitions for undefined steps with these snippets:

Given /^I open my flex app$/ do
  pending
end
 
Given /^I click the increment button$/ do
  pending
end
 
Then /^the label text should be "([^\"]*)"$/ do |arg1|
  pending
end
 
When /^I click the decrement button$/ do
  pending
end

Before implementing the steps above, we need to add the funfx component to our library.

Download the latest swc file from rubyforge and place it in your CucumberExample/libs folder (I used the version 0.2.2).

Duplicate the bin-debug folder and rename it to test (you have a bin-debug folder after the first time you run the CucumberExample from FlexBuilder).

Inside the test directory create a file called test_server.rb with the following content:

require 'webrick'
 
server = WEBrick::HTTPServer.new :Port => 9852, :DocumentRoot => File.dirname(__FILE__)
trap("INT"){ server.shutdown }
server.start

Now you need a compiled version of your project that includes funfx.We’ll use it just for testing:

build_test.sh

#!/bin/sh
FLEX_SDK_HOME="/Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3/sdks/3.2.0"
"$FLEX_SDK_HOME/bin/mxmlc" -verbose-stacktraces -include-libraries ./libs/funfx-0.2.2.swc "$FLEX_SDK_HOME/frameworks/libs/automation.swc" "$FLEX_SDK_HOME/frameworks/libs/automation_dmv.swc"  "$FLEX_SDK_HOME/frameworks/libs/automation_agent.swc" -output ./test/CucumberExample.swf -- ./src/CucumberExample.mxml

Run test compile_test.sh

chmod 755 ./build_test.sh
./build_test.sh

Now open another terminal window and start the test server:

cd /path/to/CucumberExample/test
ruby test_server.rb

Open http://localhost:9852/CucumberExample.html with your browser and you should see your flex app.

Now you can come back to your features and implement the step we leave before. Here my implementation:

CucumberExample/features/step_definitions/counter_steps.rb

Given /^I open my flex app$/ do
  open_flex_app
end
 
Given /^I click the (increment|decrement) button$/ do |button|  
  click_button("button#{button.capitalize}")  
end
 
Then /^the label text should be "([^\"]*)"$/ do |text|
  label_text.should == text  
end

open_flex_app, click_button and label_text are methods defined in my env.rb file.

CucumberExample/features/support/env.rb

require "rubygems"
require 'funfx/browser/safariwatir'
 
module FlexWorld
  def open_flex_app
    @browser.goto("http://localhost:9852/CucumberExample.html")
  end
 
  def click_button(button_id)
    @flex_app.button(:id => button_id).click
  end
 
  def label_text
    @flex_app.label(:id => "myLabel").text
  end
end
 
Before do
  @browser  = Watir::Safari.new
  @flex_app = @browser.flex_app("CucumberExample", "CucumberExample")  
end
 
After do
  @browser.close
end
 
World(FlexWorld)

Now you are ready to run your tests. Start the test_server and then the features. You should have an error:

Then the label text should be "1"  # features/step_definitions/counter_steps.rb:9
      expected: "1",
           got: "0" (using ==)

This because we didn’t implement the functionality yet in our flex app. So, change the mxml file with the following:

xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute">
	<mx:Number id="index">0mx:Number>
	<mx:VBox width="300" height="200" backgroundColor="white">
		<mx:HBox width="100%" height="30">			
			<mx:Button id="buttonDecrement" label="-" width="100%" click="index--" />
			<mx:Button id="buttonIncrement" label="+" width="100%" click="index++" />
		mx:HBox>
		<mx:HBox width="100%" height="100%" verticalAlign="middle" horizontalAlign="center">
			<mx:Label id="myLabel" text="{index}"/>			
		mx:HBox>
	mx:VBox>
mx:Application>

It’s the same code but I added the click action to the increment and decrement buttons. Now compile the new code and run the features again:

./build_test.sh
cucumber features

You shoiuld have the following output, with all the seven steps passed:

Feature: Counter
  In order to count something
  As a flex rock star
  I want to use my great flex app
 
  Scenario: Increment index            # features/counter.feature:6
    Given I open my flex app           # features/step_definitions/counter_steps.rb:1
    And I click the increment button   # features/step_definitions/counter_steps.rb:5
    Then the label text should be "1"  # features/step_definitions/counter_steps.rb:9
    When I click the decrement button  # features/step_definitions/counter_steps.rb:5
    Then the label text should be "0"  # features/step_definitions/counter_steps.rb:9
    When I click the decrement button  # features/step_definitions/counter_steps.rb:5
    Then the label text should be "-1" # features/step_definitions/counter_steps.rb:9
 
1 scenario (1 passed)
7 steps (7 passed)
0m9.781s

If you have any problems you may want to clear the cache from safari.

I used the funfx gem from rubyforge but it’s not up to date. If you want you can get the new code from github, it should have new features.

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Mask problem with flex canvas and drag & drop

Andrea Franz — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 23:34:37 +0000

Some weeks ago a spent a lot of time trying to fix a bug inside an AIR application I was working on.
I wrote a custom component that has an image as child. This image is draggable, and the container should act as a mask. The problem was that when I started dragging the picture, the picture went outside its container, like the following example.

Try dragging the red square outside the white one:

I fixed this bug just setting the scrollRect property to the container:

Only when I realized how to fix the bug I found another guy with the same problem and the same solution.

Here the code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application width="500" height="300" xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" 
  layout="vertical" verticalAlign="middle" horizontalAlign="center"
  applicationComplete="init()">
  <mx:Script>
    [CDATA[												
      public function init():void
      {				
        this.container.scrollRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, this.container.width, this.container.height);																
        this.draggableCanvas.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, this.mouseUpHandler);				
        this.draggableCanvas.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, this.mouseDownHandler);
      }			
 
      private function mouseDownHandler(event:MouseEvent):void
      {
        this.draggableCanvas.startDrag();
      }
 
      private function mouseUpHandler(event:MouseEvent):void
      {
        this.draggableCanvas.stopDrag();
        }
    ]]>
  mx:Script>
  <mx:Canvas id="container" width="300" height="250" backgroundColor="white" horizontalScrollPolicy="off" verticalScrollPolicy="off">
    <mx:Canvas id="draggableCanvas" x="50" y="25" width="200" height="200" backgroundColor="#AA0000">			
    mx:Canvas>
  mx:Canvas>
mx:Application>

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Speed up your sortable list with LiteSortable

Andrea Franz — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 16:32:24 +0000

I love to use prototype and scriptaculous to create Rich Internet Application, and I love all the built-in effects and libraries of script.aculo.us.
Today I was working with Sortable.create to provide a simple way to reorder images inside a gallery. I started using the same code used in the SortableListsDemo page of the official wiki. Each time the list is updated, the serialized list is sent to the server. The server receives the list and updates all the images positions. It’s pretty simple and works fine, but the problem is that the server executes a query for each image in the gallery. This means that if I have 100 images, 100 queries will be run. It’s a hell for my server! The best way to improve this action is to send to the server more detailed information, such as the dragged image, the old position and the new position. In this way I can execute only 2 queries for each movement. To do that I wrote a simple javascript class called LiteSortable that acts like the Sortable.create method. It receives the same parameters, and the same callbacks: onUpdate, onChange. The only change is that these 2 callbacks will receive more information about the movement, and I can improve the previous client side code with:

function sort(list, element, id, old_position, new_position) {
  new Ajax.Request('/admin/gallery_item/sort/', {
    evalScripts:true,
    parameters: {
      id: id,
      old_position: old_position,
      new_position: new_position
    }
  });
}

document.observe('dom:loaded', function() {
  new LiteSortable('list', {
    onUpdate: sort
  });
});

And the server code become like the following:

def sort
  old_position, new_position = params[:old_position].to_i, params[:new_position].to_i
  @item = GalleryItem.find(:first, :conditions => ["id = ? AND position = ?", params[:id], old_position])
  if @item
    x, y, z = old_position < new_position ? ["-", "<", ">"] : ["+", ">", "<"]
    GalleryItem.update_all("position = (position #{x} 1)", ["parent_id IS NULL AND gallery_id = ? AND position #{y}= ? AND position #{z}= ?", @item.gallery_id, new_position, old_position])
    @item.update_attribute('position', new_position)
  else
    @error = true
  end
end

If @error is true, it means that the dragged image it’s been deleted or moved by somone else.
If you want to use LiteSortable you can check out the entire project with:

svn co http://dev.gravityblast.com/svn/projects/js/LiteSortable/

…or save download the lite_sortable.js file from here.

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