Angular is an end-to-end framework for testing AngularJS applications that work as a solution integrator, combining powerful tools and technologies such as NodeJS, Selenium WebDriver, Jasmine, Cucumber, and Mocha. Angular app development services were initially developed by Google developers to support Angular applications and were later released as an open-source framework. Now Angularometer supports both Angular and non-Angular applications. Just like Gearheart provides you with this service. Angular is a wrapper written in Webdriver.js, all features kept in Selenium Webdriver are supported except for Angular-specific parts.
WebDriverJs is the official JavaScript implementation of Selenium. It uses the Selenium JSON-Wire protocol to interact with the browser in the same way as selenium java does. Angular depends on WebdriverJs to interact with the browser.
Angular general features
- Angular is one of the most used JavaScript frameworks to create web applications.
- This framework can work with pure JavaScript, but using Typescript enhances its functionality and is the recommended option for most projects. Especially when thinking about its scalability.
- Angular converts templates into highly optimized code for today’s JavaScript virtual machines.
- This allows us to serve the first look at applications in Node.js, .NET, PHP, and other languages rendered almost instantly in HTML and CSS only.
- Angular applications load quickly with the new component router. It offers users automatic code splitting to load the needed code to render the view they request.
- We will be able to quickly create UI views using simple and powerful template syntax.
- The Angular CLI command line tools will allow us to start building, adding components, and testing quickly.
Why are angular JS web elements hard to identify?
Angular JS applications have additional HTML attributes like ng-repeater, ng-controller, ng-model.. etc., which are not included in selenium locators. Selenium is not able to identify these web elements using Selenium code. Therefore, the protractor on top of selenium can handle and control these attributes in web applications.
How does an angular application start?
When you create an Angular app and run it using the ng serve command, it looks like the following image. It’s a simple angular app developed with the ng new app_name command, and nothing is modified in the app. The name of the application is angular8firstapp.
What is a protractor?
- Supports angle-specific locators: the angle application comes with angle-specific locators like ng-model, ng-bind, ng-repeat, etc., so the protractor has extended support for these locators. You don’t need to create a complex XPath for angle locators; in the protractor, these locators are ready for you, so you can use .model by. Repeater etc.
- Supports both Angular and Angular applications: protractor has extended support for angular but also supports non-angular applications. This means if your part of the application is non-angular and your part is angular, you can still choose the protractor framework and do full end-to-end test automation.
- Supports cross-browser testing: we can run our scripts in multiple browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE11, and Edge. Configuration for cross-browser testing is easy and doesn’t consume much time. We will cover this topic in detail in our upcoming tutorials.
- Supports parallel execution: consider that we have a huge number of test cases if all test cases have to run sequentially, i.e., one by one consumes a lot of time. Parallel execution helps in this case. Parallel execution runs test cases in multiple browser instances; for example, if you have 4 test cases, in a run in two browser instances, each executes two-two test cases in a single time, so in less time, more test cases will be completed.
- Supports extensibility: since Angular is a node.js application, you can use a wide range of packages available in the node. So it is possible to extend its framework or add additional functionality by installing node packages. For example, if you need an HTML report, use Jasmine HTML Reporter; for pure code, you can install eslint or tslint. Similarly, you can install node packages of your choice.
- Supports reporting plugins: compared to the non-node. Js-based open-source Automation framework, it is easy to configure the report in Angular. Jasmine HTML Reporter is one of the report-generation frameworks. Which generates HTML reports for your specifications. Below is an example of a report,
- Supports Cloud Testing Platforms: Cloud-based testing platforms allow us to run our specifications on multiple browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.), and multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Mobile, etc.). Angular is supported by powerful cloud testing platforms.
- Control Flow: The API is based on promises driven by control flow and customized for Jasmine. Angular’s APIs are entirely asynchronous. All functions return promises. It maintains a queue of pending promises, called a control flow, to keep execution organized. (We’ll cover more about promises in upcoming sections of the tutorial).
- Supports a variety of IDEs & editors: there are plenty of IDEs on the market to choose from. Visual Studio Code, WebStorm, Visual Studio Professional, Atom, and sublime are the most popular editors. (We will go into more detail in our upcoming tutorials).
- CI/CD support: once automation scripts are in place, we don’t have to manually execute and monitor them. Every time new code goes into the repository; the angularity tests should run automatically and get you a report. This means we need to automate the process; we can achieve this by integrating the Angularity test to build tools like Jenkins, TFS, or Azure DevOps. Angular supports create tool integration. (We will cover step-by-step configuration details in our upcoming tutorials).
How does the protractor work?
Angular is an end-to-end testing framework; Angular is built on top of WebdriverJS, WebdriverJS is Selenium web driver API JavaScript binding. This means that the WebdriverJS API provides an API for tests that are written in JavaScript. Angular is a selenium-based testing framework, which means Angular interacts with selenium servers and Web drivers like ChromeDriver, GeckoDriver, SafariDriver etc to simulate user actions.
When the test scripts send commands to the Selenium server, which in turn interacts with the browser driver and executes commands (performs actions), next is the assertion framework, Angular supports various assertions frameworks like Jasmine, Mocha, etc. This assertion framework helps us validate or verify values, your test will in turn, be marked as pass or fail. In short, Angular provides WebDriver, Selenium Server, Browser Driver, and Assertion Framework infrastructure to write and execute our end-to-end tests.
