in reply to Control the Web browser from the client-side?

First, to control Netscape you can use the OLE interface on Win32 and the remote control interface on unix systems.

However, you probably don't want to do this. The type of testing most people do is along the lines of fetching a page and running a regex against the returnded HTML to check for correctness. There's no need to use Netscape or IE for this, since Perl is perfectly capable of doing it.

There are dozens of modules for automated web testing on CPAN. You might look at webchatpp, HTTP::WebTest, or HTTP::MonkeyWrench. Lots of others have been announced on the mod_perl list, but I can't remember all of their names now.

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Re: Re: Control the Web browser from the client-side?
by Maestro_007 (Hermit) on Mar 07, 2002 at 21:55 UTC
    Yeah, I'm afraid for now the mandated solution is to perform all actions through a session of Netscape. I've suggested just parsing the HTML with the various Perl mods out there, and we do that to an extent when testing the actual application, but this task involves specifically testing how things are rendered on the Major Browsers.

    It's the same problem as if we were writing a Java client that called an API. We'd want a way to test that Java client, both through the GUI and through the API directly.

    In our case, however, the browser IS the GUI, and given that, we need to do more than parse the HTML according to how the Perl mods do it, we need to make sure IE and Netscape parse it the way we think they do.

    I'm definitely going to look into OLE to work with Netscape. I wasn't sure it could be used since I saw no direct mention of it here or at CPAN. Ultimately I hope it does just come down to parsing the HTML using the standard Perl modules, but in the meantime I gotta do what the boss says. In any event, I don't think rolling my own regexen are the way to go when parsing HTML.

    Update: added 'rolling my own' after perrin's most astute comments

    thanks!! MM

[reply]
      In any event, I don't think regexen are the way to go when parsing HTML

      Most of the HTML parsing modules for perl actually do use regexes. However, what I meant was a regex for checking correctness of content, as in /Hello $username/ or /order number: $order_id/.

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