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Richard Griffin's Blog

WATiN Recorder v 0.1 Released

It has taken a little longer than I first anticipated releasing the WATiN Recorder, so please except my humble apologies for this. When I first scratched this itch I had no idea that so many people out there would be interested in using the recorder. So, I wanted to ensure that the recorder got the best possible start in life. Allowing my vision of a freely downloadable web UI testing tool built which utilizes the WATiN framework can mature, powered by a passionate .Net community. I would also like to say thanks to Scott Hansleman for helping in push the Recorder into its new home; Jereon for giving birth to WATiN 1.0 and making all this stuff possible; and also Patrick Lightbody for sponsoring OpenQA.

So, I have been rather busy as of late working on a number of different Conchango projects to include; the building windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets for MSN UK(soon to be released); working on the Daily Mail eReader; and presenting the eReader at the launch of Windows Vista at TVP where Mark invited someone from the team to come up on stage and talk about our experiences of building a WPF application in the real world.

When I first built the recorder one late night many moons ago I simply did not realize just how many people would be interested in the recorder. I had always had a vision of a small community but for the large number of emails that I have received on a daily basis I am hoping that you guys can help out with powering this community to ensure the development of the recorder continues.

The WATiN Recorder can be found at openqa.org where the other open source testing tools can be found. You will need to register with openqa before you start contributing to the WATiN Recorder community. Personally I use Tortoise as my SVN client of choice there are others around, however Tortoise is very cool and extremely easy to use, IMHO streets ahead of the TFS client.

Up on the openqa server you will find a couple of projects.

The original WATiN Recorder++ which has several bug fixes and some extra bits and bobs.
Builds on the original recorder but rather than spawning a IE browser it uses an embedded IE browser control.
The final project that I have uploaded is a brain dump for getting WATiN to work with Firefox, called FireWATiN. I wanted to investigate if this was possible so there is a test client which uses sockets and jssh.

I have still to put fit and finish to the wiki but I guessed that you wanted to register and then download the code so that you can start to contribute. I look forward to seeing your contributions and together I am sure that we can creating a great testing tool for all the .Net community to benefit from.

Enjoy.

>Rich.

Published 13 March 2007 17:11 by Richard.Griffin

Filed under: .net, WATiN

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	Piers said: Hi Richard, I'd just like to say thanks for your efforts. Many people work on projects like these without getting much feedback, so I'd like to let you know it's appreciated. Piers March 13, 2007 18:56
	Jeroen van Menen said: Hi Richard, Thanks for publishing this project, this will help the adoption of WatiN even more! Jeroen. March 13, 2007 21:10
	jamie.thomson said: Care to explain to the uninitiated what WATiN stands for and what it is? March 13, 2007 23:58
	Paul said: Cool work. March 14, 2007 09:18
	Alex said: You can also try SWExplorerAutomation SWEA fromhttp://webiussoft.com. SWEA records, replays automation scripts and generates C# or VB.NET script code. SWEA supports all Web browser UI elements: form controls, frames, windows and html dialogs, popup windows, tables (transformed to DataTable) and more. SWEA was specially designed to automate complex DHTML/AJAX applications. March 16, 2007 14:13
	Richard.Griffin said: You could use one of the many commercial testing applications like SWEA, however the WATiN Recorder is FREE.... March 16, 2007 15:34
	John said: Another option: www.artoftest.com / for both FireFox & IE using the same API. March 21, 2007 02:14
	Anthony.Steele said: Hi Richard The project I am on could use a cheap, powerful and easy-to use web testing tool to keep from regressions in the web UI. The problems with some other testing tools are (if I understood correctly) in actually finding the control to work with - the example in the watiN tutorial says // Find the search text field and type Watin in it. ie.TextField(Find.ByName("q")).TypeText("WatiN"); When the page is generated by asp.net 2.0 with AJAX extensions, the control name is a lot longer (and more prone to change and thus test breakage) than just "q" - it's more like "ctl00$WebPartManagerContent$PartManager$gwpLoginPart1$LoginPart1$LoginControl$Password" I'm curious to hear how well WatiN works in these circumstances. March 23, 2007 13:39
	Jeroen van Menen said: Hi Anthony, What ASP.Net does is basically make one big name by combining all ids/names of the elements an element is nested in. To find the input box for typing in the password I would go for using the Regex option/overloads. The code would be: ie.TextField(Find.ByName(new Regex("Password$"))).TypeText("password"); See this blog and comments on how Ayende does this http://www.ayende.com/Blog/archive/2007/03/09/Writing-WatiN-Tests.aspx March 23, 2007 22:04
	Frederic Torres said: To answer Anthony Steele question about asp.net long name. At InCisif Software we partially solved this problem of asp.net very long name, by creating a concept of mapped names which make keep the test source code clear and as in Watin you can also use regular expression. That is said for ASP.NET with AJAX this does not solve really the problem. ASP.NET developers and tester should be in control of their ahtml attribute id to write good web automation. May be one day people that develop compiler, library, browser, OS, etc will develop with testing in mind. April 6, 2007 04:25
	stefano said: I've registered today at openqa.org and I have searched for your file for about 20 minutes.... I'm not able to download it!!! The only version that I have found is on this blog... but is the version of october. Thank you for helping me... when you are not a native English language person is really difficult to move in a site like openga.org.... thanks. April 26, 2007 19:25
	Jan Van Ryswyck said: I also wanted to download it today from openqa.org but couldn't find it either. When or where can we expect it? I'm looking forward having a look at it. thanks in advance April 27, 2007 23:31
	Diwakar Gupta said: Hey Richard, I browsed through the entire openqa.org but was unable to find your file. When are you releasing the build ? I am looking forward to use it. April 30, 2007 15:11
	Diwakar Gupta said: Hi Richard, I did find the source code of your WatiN Recorder on http://svn.openqa.org/svn/watir-recorder/trunk/watinrecorder/Prototypes/WATiN%20Recorder/ , but do i need to download all the source files and build the solution myself or do you have a solution already that can be downloaded ?? May 3, 2007 13:20
	Stefano said: To Diwakar Following your signal and the lack of Richard, I have tried and It's works.... download the source code and use it! :-) Do you know that there is also another recorder? The WatiN Test recorder http://watintestrecord.sourceforge.net/ that seems to be improved a lot in the version of yesterday. Perhaps looking at the two code generated, we can find the better code to use. I hope that Richard will continue soon is good work. Bye May 3, 2007 22:06
	webQ said: May 22, 2007 15:38
	webQ said: Hi Richard thank You for your great works! You A a hero in my heart. May 24, 2007 06:18
	Frederic Torres said: Richard , Is Watin Recorder gone from http://www.openqa.org/watir-recorder ? June 14, 2007 03:19
	Rajasekar said: Watin Test Recorder is recording the actions well and also compiles without error, but i'm not able to run the test, when i try to run my OS(XP) throws some error..? Any idea why this is happening? July 10, 2007 14:00
	BGeek.net said: WATiN Recorder v 0.1 Released July 11, 2007 00:56
	Bgeek.net said: WATiN Recorder v 0.1 Released August 21, 2007 10:13
	Chunsheng said: It is a great project. October 3, 2007 15:32
	Rik Beacroft said: Imagine if the WatiN class was extended into a control much like the webbrowser control. This would mean you could have a windows app that could allow simultaneous recording to an xml file or playing from an xml file. The xml file could screen scrape to defined outputs, read from an html page to check for expected validations messages as well as the setting of field values... This would mean the customer could run tests and if any fail they send the outputted xml to the development team so they can recreate the issue. It also means a customer could play a file (recording at the same time) and pause the playing of it at a specific point to check (and record) a different scenario. This is something I have done based intially on the Test Recorder - however, you could cater for all the scenarios mentioned with your WatiN Recorder. Is that an avenue you want to go down? October 24, 2007 10:30
	Owen Davies said: Unit testing web applications October 27, 2007 09:04
	Mathieu Clerte said: Ive noticed that since 2006, the link you provide http://www.openqa.org/watir-recorder/ is full of empty pages So, when will those pages be filled ? January 24, 2008 23:03