Articles tagged 'design-patterns'

  • Page Objects: Where do you put your assertions?

    April 12, 2016

    I started writing about Page Objects earlier this month, and as soon as you start talking about Page Objects, you need to have an opinion about where to put your assertions. Do you ask the page if it is in the state it expects to be or do you ask the page for values and assert that they are what you expect them to be in the test?

    If you look at FluentLenium and Simplelenium on GitHub, you’ll notice that their corresponding READMEs describe the usage of the Page Object pattern. Now, if you take a closer look, you’ll also notice that they have an opinion: they’ve included the assertions in the definition of such Page Objects.

    Now, my first experience with Page Objects was actually under these conditions. The Page Objects were the main driver…

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  • Using Page Objects in your Acceptance Tests

    April 10, 2016

    If you’ve written acceptance tests for web applications in the past (also called feature tests), you might be familiar with tools like Capybara, Simplelenium and FluentLenium. These are great abstractions over the browser (thanks, Selenium!) that provide very nice APIs for testing web applications.

    If you’ve done this for a while, you might also have heard of Page Objects. The idea behind them is that your tests should be about the behavior of your application and not about the underlying HTML, since the HTML is an implementation detail and probably not the interesting part of your tests.

    Our base acceptance test

    Let’s assume that we are working on an application where you can browse and review restaurants and we have an acceptance test…

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  • Query Objects in the Rails world - A Different Approach

    January 26, 2016

    If you have worked with Ruby on Rails before then you might be familiar with ActiveRecord scopes. Using them, you can achieve what many would consider very readable code. Let’s say that we have an application where we display an inbox where users receive messages.

    class Message < ActiveRecord::Base
    end
    

    Now, let’s imagine that after reading a Message, it is marked as read, and let’s represent that with a read column in the database. Additionally, our users can either archive the Message or move it to the trash. We’ll represent this concept with a location column in the messages table.

    Querying the database the Rails way

    Let’s say that our users want to have a way to view unread messages in their inbox. Using ActiveRecord, you could achieve…

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