I've used Selenium to do lots of UI testing from the browser. If you have a web service behind the Java jsp page i.e. in a servlet, you can test it from Selenium.
Can Selenium be used to test a B2B web service i.e. a web service called from a backend that has no browser UI component?
I have used SOAPUI to do this kind of testing in the past but our test department is trying to standardise on Selenium.
You can but I would not recommend it. If the page is returning XML, you won't be able to use the standard Selenium calls to verify what is happening as you won't have access to the DOM. If its returning plain text for JavaScript then you will struggle with verifying the output.
This is a definite case of using the right tool for the job and Selenium is not the right tool for testing web services. I would use soapUI or just use some http library to call the service URL and then verify the results.
If they are looking to standardise they need to standardise tools for their purpose. Selenium for UI, soapUI for webservices,XUnit Framework for unit and integration.
You can, but it's really not the right tool for the job. It's like trying to hammer a nail into a piece of wood using a stapler instead of a hammer.
That said, probably the most appropriate way to create a page with all your input parameters which could do the call for you and echo the results back into a html element. If the service is meant for AJAX calls then this is probably the ideal solution for your service.
The correct approach would be to use a unit testing framework and create a test harness which you can push your parameters into, execute the service call and retrieve the results in a meaningful way for assertion.
Related
My project has gotten into web services lately, but our QA team has a request to be able to set up a clone client and clone web service so that they can issue a request from the clone client to the real web service and from the real client to the clone service to test the real pieces individually.
The clone client to real web service part is easy, I just wrap the generated client in a main() app that picks up data to send that the test team specifies. But the service part is confusing to me. How can I make a dummy service that just echoes out its requests to a log without affecting the real service? I want the real client to use the same generated client code, just point the soft-coded URL to the URL of the dummy.
If I define a new web service with identical names and signatures to the real service, can the real client hit the dummy with just a URL change? Or is it more complicated? Am I barking up the wrong tree?
Re: Making a dummy service
This would actually be called making a "mock" service or a web service "stub". You don't even technically have to code it - you can use tools. For example, SoapUI has the ability to import a WSDL and create a mock service. The have some other discussion of mock services as well - they can be used both to test the client application (or to simply develop it before the back-end resources are ready or available). To use a WSDL-based service stub you would simply change the endpoint of your client-under-test to the stub instance. SoapUI will show you (and let you configure) the stub's endpoint URL.
The trendy term for service mocking and stubbing is "service virtualization" (not to be confused with server virtualization as in virtual machines). Searches using this terminology will find you even more powerful (and expensive) tooling.
Re: Just a URL Change
Yep, for the most part. So long as the XML namespaces are the same and the WSDL is the same (minus endpoint URL) you should be fine. Since the WSDL acts as an interface contract, the stub MUST accept those same inputs and produce those same outputs. How it does so, of course, is up to you.
PS - free extra advice - Don't code a dummy client. Use tools (I'll use SoapUI again as an example free tool) to make your web service testing more robust and repeatable. You can create test suites with sample SOAP requests, add assertions on how the service should behave, and best of all - your investment in time of creating a test project can be shared across team members, cutting down time to test setup and making sure testing is thorough and repeatable. If you code a client, every tester/user of the test client will have their own way of testing, response inspection will probably be manual, and you'll notice when your best QA tester goes on vacation because regressions slip into the web service product. Repeatable testing can nix this, and tool based automated functional testing is the bees knees. You're already on the right path by testing the pieces individually.
I want to create a quick test web service for a demo. Is there a quick free way to just quickly and easily make a web service that returns one string back when a call is made?
I'm looking free, easy, works out of the box type of thing with minimum setup ... preferably don't want to use any kind of Microsoft tools.
There is a simple HTTP server that returns a response with "Hello, world" on the node.js home page
JSFiddle has a free web service tailored specifically for testing web service calls. The response given back is based on the parameters passed in.
I am still trying to totally understand BDD and I am facing some doubts.
From my little experience, I have been using it to automate user acceptance test and I would like to know if it's possible to use it to test a web API, without UI.
In the past I've used BDD using the given-when-then jargon and mapping the steps to UI interactions. I've done this with Specflow in ASP.NET or cucumber/capybara in ruby on rails.
So for example we could have scenarios like this:
Given I am in the home page
When I click login button
Then I should see the login page
The current project I am working at is different. We are implementing an API based in web service which would be consumed by different type of clients. Like an iphone app, android app and an asp based web client. So our main focus is based in the back-end and just that.
In this case, the tests can't be faced from the UI point of view. So our end-to-end tests are based in our service endpoints. We pass some input arguments to a service calls and check the outputs.
Can we do this using BDD? Is this right?
or maybe it would be better to use a different thing like FitNesse?
Hmm.. is using FitNesse doing BDD?
I think you can do what your writing about in BDD. I'm not sure if those 2 links about testing of webservices with SpecFlow will help you but take a look on them if you haven't seen it yet.
http://codedetective.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/testing-webservices-with-specflow.html
http://www.creamdog.se/blog/2011/02/24/webservices-automated-tests-using-specflow-and-babelfish/
Have a look at Karate, web service testing framework by Intuit. It's recently being open sourced. It has the capability of handling API dealing with HTML, JSON, XML, GraphQL queries and is built on top on cucumber.
Simple intro here : https://medium.com/blueprint-by-intuit/karate-web-services-testing-made-simple-366e8eb5adc0#.qnpy5gagt
Is there a way to test a Web Service using VS2010 like it's used to test a web site?
For a web site I can create a set of WebTestRequest objects that emulate the loading and the parsing of a web page from the test and then, implementing the GetRequestEnumerator I can yield results to the load test so that the execution time and payload of any single page could be evaluated by the test runner and published in my test run reports.
I would like to do the same for a test using web service call so that each time I call the web service (there is some logic in calling it, like logging in, getting a security token and pass a proper formatted XML document to the web service method) I can yield the result to my test runner and evaluate it.
Is there a way to do it or do I need to implement a specific class inheriting from the WebTestItem abstract class?
Regards
Massimo
Yes, it is possible to test Web Services using Web Performance Tests in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate.
Here's a couple of useful links:
How to: Create a Web Service test (MSDN)
How to: Web Service Load Testing Using VSTS 2010 (Blog)
As a starting point, you can use a web proxy tool like Fiddler to intercept the HTTP requests made to the Web Services, copy the contents of the SOAP envelopes in the Web Performance Tests and then tweak them accordingly based on the test scenario you want to simulate.
This doesn't quite answer your question as it's a 3rd party tool, but SOAP UI is a great piece of (free) software for load testing web services, whether your own or someone else's. You can run individual requests, or do a bunch of different load tests.
We've used it for one service that uses credentials, so I'm sure it will work fine for your scenario.
I am a novice in web services. I am totally new to testing web services.
A new project demands that I test the web services, and the customer is in favor of any open source tool.
What is the approach to testing web services?
Also Please suggest a tool(with minimal scripting) to test web services?
Check out SoapUI - one of the best web service test tools - plus it's free!!
They also have a "Pro" version which costs - you can do more stuff, like load testing etc., but the free version is quite good enough for most of your testing, I'd say!
Given a WSDL (online or stored as file), it'll create stubs for each method, which you can then use to create requests (as XML), fill in the blanks (the parameter values), and then you can send off your request to the web service and see what comes back as a response.
SoapUI also allows you to write scripted tests than can be run over and over again.
Excellent tool - can't praise it enough!
Marc
Additionally you could use Firefox Poster in order to test your web service by passing XML-packets manually.
Check it here:
FF Poster
SoapUI is a great tool to test SOAP webservices. It allows you to test a SOAP client or a SOAP server.
Another very useful tool is Fiddler. Fiddler isn't necessarily aimed at testing webservices (it's a HTTP debugger), but since SOAP webservices run over HTTP, you can use it to testing. Another very important advantage of using Fiddler is the fact that you can test REST webservices also.
You might want to consider robot framework. It is a generic, keyword-driven testing framework. There are libraries for testing REST and SOAP based web services. It can also be used to test web pages (via a selenium library), databases, and a whole lot more.
robotframework has a ton of built-in keywords, and there are additional libraries that do much more. You are also able to develop your own keywords in python, java, .NET languages, or any other language.