Blog Post - Karate Test Automation #263
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Great stuff Stu! Couple of thoughts in general,
- Could do with a scattering of links to some things folks might want to read more about / might not have heard of (Cucumber?)
- There's a lot of abbreviation which feels a bit odd, there's no character limit (e.g. & and +)
- Could do with a little more hand holding through the examples personally to make it easier to understand what's happening for the layman
Give me a shout if you want to chat on anything 😄
| - API | ||
| - Open Source | ||
| - Karate | ||
| summary: In this blog i'll introduce the Karate Test Automation Framework and talk about some of the fun and |
| offerings in the open source space - don't even ask me how many times I've been bitten by Selenium's reluctance to play | ||
| nice with UI elements or been snowed under trying to get my head around a complex multi-util, multi-file test scenario. | ||
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| Karate is essentially a Gherkin-like programming language, with the ability to use Java & JavaScript almost seamlessly |
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Might be worth a link to Gherkin for those unfamiliar
| Comparison Testing, amongst other features. | ||
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| # So Stuart, what are you going to show us? | ||
| There's a whole host of interesting & handy features of the Framework, but I'll focus on a few that make API testing |
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ampersand feels unnecessary? Also not sure framework needs a capital
| implementing the step-definitions correctly, which means higher time investment and ultimately less readable code in the | ||
| background. | ||
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| Karate lets us use keywords straight out the box, no need for step-definitions & no need for code, everything is |
| And match response.data[*].first_name contains "Tobias" | ||
| ~~~ | ||
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| That's all we need - this test that will verify that the `users` endpoint returns a 200. Additionally, we run an |
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"this test that will verify that the" 😕
| of using Karate, I feel that it provides a really nice middle-ground that empowers the tester to make the decision on | ||
| how readable their test scenarios are. | ||
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| ## Hybrid Scenarios (+ a sneak peek into Karate UI Automation) |
| ~~~ | ||
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| Firstly, we have our API call to create the new user. We then need to tell Karate that our `baseUrl` has now changed to | ||
| the UI one. Then we instantiate a `driver` instance, and use locators stored in a `homePagelocators.json` file in order |
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might be worth linking to the docs a bit for some things like driver for example https://karatelabs.github.io/karate/karate-core/#driver
| Lastly, I want to talk about Dynamic Scenario Outlines. | ||
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| If you're used to Cucumber then you've probably got an understanding of Scenario Outlines - they let you run through | ||
| the exact same test steps but with your variables & data driven directly from a table, for example: |
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I'll not comment each one going forward...
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| This is great for running through a bulk set of tests where we don't necessarily know some vital inputs before | ||
| execution. There's a few others ways to do something similar in Karate, but another benefit of Dynamic Scenario Outlines | ||
| is that Karate will still respect any parallel execution configuration, meaning we can run this across `x` threads with |
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I think n is probably a more common variable than x here - having x in backticks made me think I'd missed a reference to it somewhere above. Could you replace x with maybe "multiple"?
| no extra config outside of the parallel runner configuration. | ||
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| # Conclusion | ||
| The aim of this blog post was just to show some features of the Karate Test Framework that make API (and UI!) testing |
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The conclusion falls a bit flat for me personally - would be good to reword this as a summary of your thoughts on things here.
I'd say something like "look out for future posts where I'll dive deeper into..."
I'd remove the line and resources heading and just make that paragraph part of the conclusion text personally.
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What Dave said: don't be shy!
Tell us there'll be a follow-up, and that might even encourage you to write it 😉
| # Tell Karate that this is our "base url" for all Scenarios in this Feature File | ||
| * baseUrl 'https://reqres.in/api' | ||
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| @setup |
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This annotation is used for the first time here, I missed it first time through... Can you call it out in the description?
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| Since we told our Scenario Outline to use the `userData` array as its data source via our `Examples` table, it will have access | ||
| to any key-value pair present in that array. Here's a snippet of the data array from the `users` endpoint: |
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An array doesn't have key-value pairs, it's the user entries that have those. Are you saying that we can use the id key which will be replaced with the value? That was a little unclear to me.
| is that Karate will still respect any parallel execution configuration, meaning we can run this across `x` threads with | ||
| no extra config outside of the parallel runner configuration. | ||
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| # Conclusion |
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Level 2 heading here:
## Conclusion
| author: sdewar | ||
| --- | ||
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| # Introduction |
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Change this to level2 heading: ## Introduction
In fact, you arguably don't need "Introduction" as a heading at all, because we can expect some introduction at the top of a blog post.
| no extra config outside of the parallel runner configuration. | ||
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| # Conclusion | ||
| The aim of this blog post was just to show some features of the Karate Test Framework that make API (and UI!) testing |
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What Dave said: don't be shy!
Tell us there'll be a follow-up, and that might even encourage you to write it 😉
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| [Karate Documentation](https://karatelabs.github.io/karate/) | ||
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| [Stack Overflow](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/karate) |
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Link text should be more descriptive, e.g. "Karate on Stack Overflow"
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| Karate lets us write our test scenarios straight out the box - there's no need to write Java glue code or | ||
| step-definitions like Cucumber. The example below showcases this perfectly - there's no additional setup needed | ||
| or extra digging into the technical behind-the-scenes implementation in order to get testing our services. |
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the technical, behind-the-scenes implementation
| chain commands on the back of the locator being found as opposed to waiting for the locator, storing it, then performing | ||
| an action. | ||
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| This means we have a tidy of steps that will spin up our driver, wait for elements to appear, perform |
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"This means we have a tidy of steps"?
| ID's and then send a DELETE request to `https://reqres.in/api/users/${id}` for each one. | ||
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| In the below example, we have a `@setup` Scenario which is our data setup for our Scenario Outline. | ||
| Up until now we are used to the `Background` section running for every Scenario, but that's not the case here, so we need |
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might just be me - why is it not the case? Is it because @setup causes that to behave differently? If so why do we need to define the baseUrl in background at all here?
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Yeah its a weird quirk of the implementation that tripped me up for many hours, @setup runs before background so @setup doesn't know about anything we've set up in background.
We still need it in the background so our Scenario Outline (and any other scenarios in the file) know what the baseUrl is. I'll update and perhaps link to that specific part of the docs here.
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ah ok, at least it's not just me being dumb 😆
| a deeper dive into some of the other key features such as exploring the comprehensive assertion features, image | ||
| comparison, built in HTML reporting or data driven tests via tags. | ||
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| The Documentation for Karate is really solid, with lots of examples and good explanations of each bit of functionality. |
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capital D not needed?
Please add a direct link to your post here:
https://sdewar-scottlogic.github.io/blog/2024/10/28/an-introduction-into-karate-test-automation.html
Have you (please tick each box to show completion):
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