PageUnit: TODO

$Id: TODO.html,v 1.23 2006/03/14 18:59:35 ian Exp $

Outright bugs

If there are any plain bugs, they will be listed here.

• T only works for some tags (Title?) at present.

Shorter ToDo

This is a list of short things that should or will be done to the framework in the near future.

• Make ScriptTestCase constuctor accept java.io.File() that represents a directory, move directory logic from PageUnit to ScriptTestCase.
• An Ant task for running from build.xml.
• Add a Preferences that makes logger.properties get read (-Djava.util.logging.config.file).
• Add boolean majorFailure in TestRunner. Cases G,U,P,S do

  mf=true; test; mf = false

  ; others do if (mf) { continue; }
• From there, make testrunner be a state machine. Allows to skip Dependent pages, to avoid cascading errors
• An easier way of major failure handling would be groups, e.g., ( P F R R S ) (on 6 lines of course).
• Use configs for access into properties file (like sqlrunner)
• Add "Back button" functionality
• Add "random page jumping" functionality to jump randomly around in n recently visited pages.
• Make this shorter TODO even shorter.

Longer-term

The following is the short list of major changes which is currently under consideration:

• JavaScript Interaction
  Web pages of moderate complexity often use JavaScript-based code for one of these purposes:
  - to update the remainder of a form based on choices made in e. g., a drop-down list (like setting the name of the "Postal Code" field to "Zip Code" if the Country choice is set to "United States";
  - to automatically submit a form once certain fields are filled in, so that the server-side component can re-display the form with changes made as above;
  - to validate forms input.
  For these reasons, an implementation of some or part of JavaScript (itself a "little language") is required for PageUnit to be able fully to test web sites. This is partly implemented.
• Output Formatting
  The current version of PageUnit simply displays errors in plain text. It is desirable to provide a summary report, which will probably occur in several stages, each involving re-use of existing software:
  1) Use the JUnit textual report formatter;
  2) Use the JUnit graphical (Swing/AWT) runner;
• Intelligent Dumping
  It might be useful to be able to get a display of the request and response headers on a single request or series of request.
• Database Verification
  Although it is not formally part of the domain for which PageUnit was originally designed, it is useful in some circumstances to verify that a given value has been inserted or updated in a relational database as a result of invoking a web operation. I have some unpublished code at my disposal that is designed to simplify direct SQL access to such databases, so it should be possible in future to add this capability to PageUnit.
• Integration with Groovy (in both directions!)