Skip to main content

Unstable Vaadin UI tests

I have experienced a lot of issues with UI testing with Vaadin and Selenium. The test cases might seem to run OK initially but turn out very easily to be unstable, especially if the machine running tests is much faster/slower than the machine the tests have been written. The setups I have used contains some version of selenium, Robot framework, jBehave or CasperJS and PhantomJS, Chrome or Firefox. I haven't used the Vaadin Testbench. Here are my five cents to create stable Vaadin UI tests.

  • Don't use the in-built "is page loaded" methods, those rarely apply to single page JS apps.
  • Use the JS object "vaadin" and its properties isActive() and initialized to determine when it is OK to modify the UI.
  • Run in production mode, I have had a lot fewer issues like this.
  • Capture the browser logs, filter out there all info category messages and see if there are errors.
  • Use xpaths to find the correct elements. I have noticed that it helps if you wait first for some upper element and after that check that if the target element has appeared, so something like waitVisibity(//root-of-target) and then waitAndManipulate(//root-of-target/.../target) .
  • Sometimes the client<->server communication just breaks, especially with PhantomJS. I have no good solution for this, I just usually just refresh the page.
  • If you update the UI multiple times after the view has initially loaded and use WebSockets, doing manipulations during that time will most probably cause random issues. Wait until all data is pushed to the UI. The isActive() method may help but usually is too slow to keep up.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bird is causing high CPU on my macOS

There is no lack of people complaining about MacOS Tahoe, mostly about rounded corners and inconsistent design decisions. I have not paid that much attentention to that, but there is one mac bug i have paid attention to. It hasn't been a visual or ux but rather few system processes pegging the CPU. trustd , alongside with ecosystemd and ecosystemanalyticsd all reported high CPU usage. I can't exactly recall when this started, it might have predated my Tahoe upgrade but anyway, the trio of processes all had high CPU usage. Sure, it may have been the virtual efficiency cores and whether it affeced battery life or slowed down other processes i don't know to be hon...
Post a Comment
Read more

I'm not a passionate developer

A family friend of mine is an airlane pilot. A dream job for most, right? As a child, I certainly thought so. Now that I can have grown-up talks with him, I have discovered a more accurate description of his profession. He says that the truth about the job is that it is boring. To me, that is not that surprising. Airplanes are cool and all, but when you are in the middle of the Atlantic sitting next to the colleague you have been talking to past five years, how stimulating can that be? When he says the job is boring, it is not a bad kind of boring. It is a very specific boring. The "boring" you would want as a passenger. Uneventful.  Yet, he loves his job. According to him, an experienced pilot is most pleased when each and every tiny thing in the flight plan - goes according to plan. Passengers in the cabin of an expert pilot sit in the comfort of not even noticing who is flying. As someone employed in a field where being boring is not exactly in high demand, this sounds pro...
Post a Comment
Read more

Building a OTel sink that follows GenAI semantic conventions

I've been working on an OTel sink recently. To be more specific, it concerns receiving telemetry data from LLM interactions. Fortunately, there is a spec for all of this called GenAI Semantic Conventions . That is what I based my work on, so I can make assumptions about key attributes to highlight in the sink's UI, which is actually a CLI in my case. I dogfooded my handrolled sink using Pydantic AI (my favorite LLM framework), and all good, it follows the spec well. Key attributes flow in as specified. Pydantic AI also includes some of its own attributes, but that is expected. However, pick something like Claude Code, (via anthropic agent sdk), the reality is a bit different. It does not follow the spec at all. It has its own custom attribute layout . Same direction, different flavor with LangChain. The Python source has zero opentelemetry imports anywhere. None. The ls_* namespace ( ls_provider , ls_model_name , ls_temperature ) is its own thing, with LangSmith as the on...
Post a Comment
Read more