Book Image

Getting Started with PhantomJS

By : Aries beltran
Book Image

Getting Started with PhantomJS

By: Aries beltran

Overview of this book

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit browser with JavaScript API that allows you to create new ways to automate web testing. PhantomJS is currently being used by a large number of users to help them integrate headless web testing into their development processes. It also gives you developers a new framework to create web-based applications, from simple web manipulation to performance measurement and monitoring.A step step-by by-step guide that will help you develop new tools for solving web and testing problems in an effective and quick way. The book will teach you how to use and maximize PhantomJS to develop new tools for web scrapping, web performance measurement and monitoring, and headless web testing. This book will help you understand PhantomJS’ scripting API capabilities and strengths.This book starts by looking at PhantomJS’ JavaScript API, features, and basic execution of scripts. Throughout the book, you will learn details to help you write scripts to manipulate web documents and fully create a web scrapping tool.Through its practical approach, this book strives to teach you by example, where each chapter focuses on the common and practical usage of PhantomJS, and how to extract meaningful information from the web and other services.By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills to enable you to use PhantomJS for web testing, as well as learning the basics of Jasmine, and how it can be used with PhantomJS.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

Capturing alert messages

It is common for most web developers to display a message using the JavaScript alert message box. These are pop-up messages that are displayed on top of the browser. Since we are running a headless browser, these pop ups will not be seen, but rest assured that they are triggered. We can still capture these events using the webpage onAlert().

var page = require('webpage').create();

page.onAlert = function(msg) {
  console.log(msg);
};

In the preceding code, we had overridden the onAlert callback after we created an instance of the web page module. The function receives a single parameter, which contains the message intended to be displayed in the pop-up message box. The function process that we provided here will be used by all alert messages—we can consume the message and display it to our console, or we can capture and save it as a list of messages received.