Testing User Interaction with JavaScript

Question

I can't get Lettuce / Splinter or JsTestDriver to run tests of user interaction with Backbone-generated DOM objects. For example, at the hello backbone tutorial , I want to simulate the user's click on the button labeled "Add list item", then verify that a <li> element of text "hello world1" has appeared.

JsTestDriver: I can get a reference to the button element and call click() on it, but then document.getElementsByTagName("li") fail (or return null?).

Johansen's excellent book says that testing event handlers isn't properly a unit testing task. So I tried my BDD (?) tools for Django:

Lettuce / Splinter / Django: The Splinter Browswer object can't see the text in the button, never mind get a reference to it or click it. (It does handle these operations for elements created via HTML.) Neither world.browser.is_text_present() nor find_by_id() work; passing a wait time to the former didn't help.

I would really prefer to avoid going straight to Selenium, and thought that these tools made that unnecessary. So now what?

Answer 1

While firing DOM events may technically not be "unit testing", it doesn't mean you can't use a unit testing framework to do it :) This is more of a case of definition.

Anyway, you can achieve what you want with eg JsTestDriver, but I would advise against doing it manually through eg click() (which likely does not do what you expect it to). I usually use jQuery to fire events, and this can safely be done with eg JsTestDriver. This should work even if you don't use jQuery in your production code.