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"Does anyone know why a Selenium click event might not trigger the same activity as directly triggering the DOM id through javascript? We have a form submit button that works fine when directly activated but doesn't work in Selenium."

It was suggested that perhaps this is a timing issue. Maybe some required JS for the form hasn't loaded before Selenium is trying the event.

One workaround would be to test only the form submission called by on-click instead of the click itself.

Interesting

• Ian Mcfarland talks to Geoffrey Grosenbach about Pivotal's agile culture in the May 17 episode of the Rails Podcast. Check it our here.
• This Wednesday's brown bag will be a round table discussion about "Tracker and the client: The real vs. the ideal". Lunch provided, as always.
• When something in Rails isn't working as expected, it may just be a bug that's been reported or fixed recently. Is a good idea to check the the Trac tickets at dev.rubyonrails.org.

Help

• Rails rcov seems to get stuck in an infinite loop on Leopard.
• Anyone know a good general practitioner within walking distance of the office?
• Confirm dialogs are tripping up Selenium (8.1) on one of our projects. Something related to focus, perhaps?
• What does Ní Hea mean?

Selenium RC Fu is a fantastic system for testing Ruby On Rails applications. It is the blending of xUnit testing with Selenium. Selenium is a cool system that operates your browser as if a human were sitting there moving the mouse pressing buttons and keys.

Selenium RC Fu is also a remarkable example of the power of open source. It's selenium remotely controlled by rails and ruby. You can learn more about it by viewing the slides for Full-stack webapp testing with Selenium and Rails presented by my colleagues Alex Chaffee and Brian Takita at the SDForum Silicon Valley Ruby Conference.

Now that you are excited about Selenium RC Fu, by law I must inform you that this wonderful testing tool comes with some costs. First, this is the daisy cutter of testing -- problems will be detected, but it won't be too specific about those problems. A failed selenium test will likely only tell you some expected text was not present on the page -- you have to do some digging to discover the real problem.

It's also slow. To be fair, a lot of software is running to do this testing.

So use selenium testing sparingly. A good strategy is to restrict selenium testing to "happy path" testing. These happy path tests become a compliment to other more focused and faster unit and integration tests.