Book Image

UI Testing with Puppeteer

By : Dario Kondratiuk
Book Image

UI Testing with Puppeteer

By: Dario Kondratiuk

Overview of this book

Puppeteer is an open source web automation library created by Google to perform tasks such as end-to-end testing, performance monitoring, and task automation with ease. Using real-world use cases, this book will take you on a pragmatic journey, helping you to learn Puppeteer and implement best practices to take your automation code to the next level! Starting with an introduction to headless browsers, this book will take you through the foundations of browser automation, showing you how far you can get using Puppeteer to automate Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. You’ll then learn the basics of end-to-end testing and understand how to create reliable tests. You’ll also get to grips with finding elements using CSS selectors and XPath expressions. As you progress through the chapters, the focus shifts to more advanced browser automation topics such as executing JavaScript code inside the browser. You’ll learn various use cases of Puppeteer, such as mobile devices or network speed testing, gauging your site’s performance, and using Puppeteer as a web scraping tool. By the end of this UI testing book, you’ll have learned how to make the most of Puppeteer’s API and be able to apply it in your real-world projects.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Manipulating handles with JavaScript code

We talked about ElementHandle in Chapter 4, Interacting with a Page. Let's recap this concept. ElementHandle is a variable in our code pointing to a DOM element inside the page we are automating. Now it's time to know that an ElementHandle is, in fact, a JSHandle.

In the same way that ElementHandle is a variable pointing to an element in the browser, a JSHandle is a variable pointing to a variable on the page we are automating. If we think about that, the only difference between a JavaScript variable like, for instance, document.URL, and a DOM element, like document.activeElement, is that a DOM element has a visual representation, that's all. So, we can say that an ElementHandle (a DOM element) is also a JSHandle (a JavaScript variable). Inheritance 101.

We were using functions like $ or $x to get ElementHandles. Now we can also use evaluateHandle, which works like evaluate, but as Puppeteer knows that we want a pointer...