I've started looking at writing integration tests for an ASP.Net application. I have a farily complex application with quite a bit happening in the UI layer. Some pages are fairly simple data entry forms, and some contains UI that is scary to just think about (the amount of work it would take). It has long been my belief that it is not worth testing the UI layer. A lot of effort goes into this, and it is usually fragile in the face of changes.

The problem is that without tests is it very easy to break stuff, and I get lost in the amount of pages / controls that I have there already. It took a failure (in the middle of a client demo, of course) to convince me that it is not enough to verify changes manually. I'm currently investigating WATIR, and it looks like it is farily simple to work with it once we learn ruby, the API and the quirks.

Current things that I have issues with are speed, state, enconding, controls naming, popups and alerts.

Speed seems to be an issue, so far I have only tested it in interactive mode, but it looks like it takes quite a bit of time to run. Quite a bit of time means that I can see things happening. Looking at the documentation, I noticed such things as -f (fast), so it may be a debug mode slowdown so I could keep track of what is going on.

State is the issue of what is the current state of the application for the test. For instance, I may want to try updating an entity, and this means that it have to exists, or creating an entity when it has a certain parents, etc. This require a lot more thought than just Unit Tests, since in Unit Tests I either mocks the whole infrastructure layer (and it is not fun, trust me), or I nuke the entire DB between tests. Testing it via ASP.Net is more complex, since I have to take into account such things as caching, etc. This make it a more real test case, but make it harder to write the test. Oh well, at least the secretary wouldn't do it.

Enconding may be a problem. This is still a heresay only, but I understand that ruby has issues with unicode. A lot of the texts that I need to verify in my pages is in Hebrew, so this may be a real problem. We haven't run into it yet, but we are just beginning.

Controls naming is an ugly beast in ASP.Net, you get names like this one "ShowArchive1$dgArchive$_ctl3$_ctl0", and they may change very easily. I really don't like to see them in the tests. I think that using indexes to find the controls is just as evil in any case.

Popups and alerts seems to be a weak point in WATIR, I couldn't get it to work no matter what I did, and eventually I had to resort to this to get a simple confirm dialog to work. Just so you would understand, this opens a whole new process just to send an OK to the window. There doesn't seem to be any way to get the text of the cofirm/alert window. More worrying is the popup functionality, I can't find a way to handle a modal popup nicely. It looks like I would need two tests there, one to handle the code up to the popup and afterward, and another to handle the popup itself.

Some interesting links about WATIR:

• Integrating Ruby and Watir with NUnit - Scott Hanselman getting started on WATIR
• Ruby or Watir tests included in CruiseControl.NET - Setting up CC integration
• New Release of WatirMaker now WatirRecorder - UI to start getting the scripts.
• WATIR Frequently Asked Questions