The Market

Byward Market, Ottawa, Ontario

© 2011 Darren De Ridder

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Selenium IDE Flow Control - Goto and While Loops

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tldr;https://github.com/73rhodes/sideflow

This extension provides goto, gotoIf and while loop functionality in Selenium IDE. Selenium IDE is a plugin for Firefox that automates the testing of web-based applications. There is an excellent flow-control extension at wiki.openqa.org/display/SEL/flowControl for the Selenium RC and TestRunner components, but it does not work with Selenium IDE (the Firefox plugin) directly. This makes it difficult to develop controlled test cases within Selenium IDE, and there are times when the frame-based TestRunner cannot be used (such as when the website under test employs a frame-buster script).

I've ported the existing control-flow extension to work in the Selenium IDE Firefox add-on. The image below shows a sample test case using goto, gotoIf and a while loop, all running successfully in Selenium IDE.


The file can be downloaded from Github and should be saved as "sideflow.js" to your hard drive. Then the Options settings in Selenium …
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REST API Best Practices 4: Collections, Resources and Identifiers

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Other articles in this series:
REST API Best Practices: A REST Cheat SheetREST API Best Practices: HTTP and CRUDREST API Best Practices: Partial Updates - PATCH vs. PUT RESTful APIs center around resources that are grouped into collections. A classic example is browsing through the directory listings and files on a website like http://vault.centos.org/. When you browse the directory listing, you can click through a series of folders to download files.  The folders are collections of CentOS resource files.



In Rest, collections and resources are accessed via HTTP URI's in a similar way:

members/ -- a collection of members
members/1 -- a resource representing member #1
members/2 -- a resource representing member #2

It may help to think of a REST collection as a directory folder containing files, although its highly unlikely that the member data is stored as literal JSON files on the server. The member data should be coming from a database, but from the perspective of a REST API, it look…
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REST API Best Practices 3: Partial Updates - PATCH vs PUT

This post is a continuation of REST API Best Practices 2: HTTP and CRUD, and deals with the question of partial updates.

REST purists insist that PATCH is the only "correct" way to perform partial updates [1], but it hasn't reached "best-practice" status just yet, for a number of reasons.

Pragmatists, on the other hand, are concerned with building mobile back-ends and APIs that simply work and are easy to use, even if that means using PUT to perform partial updates [2].

The problems with using PATCH for partial updates are manifold:
Support for PATCH in browsers, servers and web application frameworks is not universal. IE8, PHP, Tomcat, django, and lots of other software has missing or flaky support for it. So depending on your technology stack and users, it might not even be a valid option for you.Using the PATCH method correctly requires clients to submit a document describing the differences between the new and original documents, like a diff file, rather th…
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