One of my recent projects used Selenide and then SpringBoot in the tech stack for UI test automation.
And I encountered one problem there.
The Problem
For that test automation project I implemented Page Object and Page Component patterns.
It gives better code structure, better readability and, of course, better code maintainability.
When SpringBoot was integrated I wanted to inject ‘page component’ into ‘page object’ using Spring DI mechanism.
And what happened? Unfortunately, I was not able to do so.
Input
I had a helper method at() that creates a page object instance and makes the test script more readable:
public static <T> T at(Class<T> pageClass) {
return Selenide.page(pageClass);
}When you develop a test script it looks like following:
@Test
public void userCanRegisterTest(User user){
at(HomePage.class)
.acceptCookies()
.registerUser(user);
//rest of the test
}So you know exactly “where you are” - what page object you are currently working with. I find it pretty convenient.
And here’s the code that did not work for me:
@Component
public class HomePage {
@Autowired
private Header header;
@Autowired
private Footer footer;
...
}Note that I didn’t create Header or Footer with new anywhere in the code
and Header and Footer classes were annotated with @Component.
So these autowired fields are never resolved and are null. This is actually quite obvious but if you are new to Spring/Selenide it might be a little bit disappointing.
The problem is how Selenide instantiates page objects. It uses newInstance() to create a page object. And Spring does not work this way.
Solution
Actually Spring has a mechanism how to handle autowiring in objects which are created with new or newInstance() etc.
You can check several approaches described in this issue on StackOverflow.
But frankly speaking I think this is not a good idea. It’s better to rework your design not to overcomplicate your TAF.
Still, it’s test automation.. keep it simple.