Extreme-headless NPM

About

End to end ("E2E") testing generally means automating the flow and actions that a 'real' user might take. Of course, we must also examine the responses that the browser (app) produces to ensure that the app is performing properly.

There are plenty of excellent tools available for this. However, there are also use cases that demand that we 'scrape' sites at runtime. Some tools provide the ability to produce dom-like structures from raw HTML and these are useful. However, in other cases, we want to click on an element on the site, and have it respond -- just like our E2E automation tools do. In other words, have the power of our end-to-end testing tool available to us in a production environment.

But... there is usually a problem with this.

App servers and API servers generally lack the pre-requisite graphics capability to run browsers based on Webkit etc. which our E2E tools require.

This is from Puppeteer's GITHUB project. LINK

Challenging? Yes and could be impossible to implement in your environment.

Installation

npm install extreme-headless --save-dev

Run tests

npm test

About this project

This project is about providing a level of programmatic interaction with a web page that mimics the E2E tools we use. The keyword here is 'level'. It is neither perfect nor complete.

Capabilities

Extreme headless provides the following:

Navigation
Find by selector
Find all by selector
find by name (name=)
Find where link contains text
Click on an element
Set a value on an input field (input, checkbox, selects)
Wait for an element to appear on the page and specify a custom timeout
Be notified of XMLHTTPRequest open and send requests
Intercept and respond to window.confirm
Intercept window.alert

In addition, scripts on the page will be run - even on a click event. For example,

click a button.
the button fires a XMLHttpRequest.
Data is retrieved and the DOM updated.

This will work.

Event support

Extreme headless provides event support that allows you to hook into the following events.

aftergoto. After navigation is complete
console. All console.log events from the client site are returned
xhr. XHR events open and send are passed including readyState, responseText and responseURL.
alert
confirm
shutdown

Example of event handling

const events = () => {

    extremeHeadless.on( 'shutdown', () => {
        console.log( '** Shutdown event received. **');
    })

    extremeHeadless.on( 'aftergoto', () => {
        console.log( '** After goto. **');
    })

    extremeHeadless.on( 'alert', ( message ) => {
        console.log( message );
    })

    extremeHeadless.on( 'confirm', ( message ) => {
        console.log( message );
       // return true for OK, false for cancel
    })

    extremeHeadless.on( 'console', ( message ) => {
        console.log( message );
    })

    extremeHeadless.on( 'xhr', ( responseText, arguments ) => {
        console.log( arguments );
    })
}

Alert and Confirm intercept

/**
 * Alert callback
 * @param message
 */
const onAlert = ( message ) => {
    // anything to do?
};


/**
 * onConfirm callback.
 * @param message
 * @returns {boolean} true = ok, false = cancel
 */
const onConfirm = ( message ) => {
    return true; // same as the user clicking 'ok'
};

API

First, you need to initialise Extreme headless. It accepts an options object.

const extremeHeadless = require ( 'extreme-headless' );

const initOptions = {
    baseUrl   : 'https://www.google.com',
    strictSSL : true,
    onAlert, // <== Optional
    onConfirm, // <== Optional
    runScripts: true, // Enable JavaScript to run on fetched page
    userAgent: 'user agent string' // optional
    // default UA is:
    // Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4449.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/91.0.838.3

};

extremeHeadless.init ( initOptions );

Now, we can navigate to a page. Here, I am just going to perform a search using Google.

// Search and wait
await extremeHeadless.goto ( '/search?q=nodejs', true );

This goes to the Google search page and waits until the page has loaded.

Just to ensure we have the results, we can use the waitFor element API and wait for a maximum of 10 seconds.

// get the results
await extremeHeadless.waitFor( '#result-stats', 10);

Google has a div with an ID called result-stats. Now, we get a list of all links that contain the word 'node'. This is done via this API call.

const allLinks = extremeHeadless.findLinkText('node');

We can then iterate through all links and use that info in any way we want.

Here, I just log the href.

 allLinks.forEach( entry => console.log(  entry.getAttribute('href') ));

API Documentation

API	Parameters	Returns
click	P1 -> HTMLElement or CSS Selector
fillField	P1 -> HTMLElement or CSS Selector, P2 -> Value
find	P1 -> CSS Selector	HTMLElement or null if not found
findAll	P1 -> CSS Selector	HTMLElement or null if not found
goto	P1 -> Relative path (/pathtopage), P2 (optional) -> wait (default is false.	Promise -- use with await
init	P1 -> options object
waitFor	P1 -> CSS Selector P2 (optional) -> Timeout value in seconds

API Examples

init

This is always the first call. It expects an options object.

Example:

/**
 * Alert callback
 * @param message
 */
const onAlert = ( message ) => {
    // anything to do?
};


/**
 * onConfirm callback.
 * @param message
 * @returns {boolean} true = ok, false = cancel
 */
const onConfirm = ( message ) => {
    return true; // click 'OK'
};

const initOptions = {
    baseUrl   : 'https://www.google.com',
    strictSSL : true,
    onAlert, // alert callback
    onConfirm, // confirm callback
    runScripts: true // Enable JavaScript to run on the fetched page

};

Option	Parameters
baseUrl	Self-explanatory
debug	P1 -> HTMLElement or CSS Selector, P2 -> Value
strictSSL	Used to ignore invalid certificates
runScripts	Used to run scripts inside the page tat has been loaded
timeout	Used by te waitFor API. How long to with for an element (in seconds) before timing out.

Click

Click an element. Just like a user would.

Find an element, then click

const sportsNews = extremeHeadless.find( 'div[data-tab-id="sportsNews"]');
extremeHeadless.click( sportsNews );

Click using a selector

extremeHeadless.click( 'div[data-tab-id="sportsNews"]' );

fillField

Used to provide an input field with a value.

As with click, you can provide a CSS selector, or HTMLElement.

let obj = extremeHeadless.find( '#username');
extremeHeadless.fillField( obj, 'someone@co.uk');

or...

let obj = extremeHeadless.find( '#username');
extremeHeadless.fillField( '#username', 'someone@co.uk');

find

Find returns the HTMLElement that matches a CSS selector or null if not found.

const sportsNews = extremeHeadless.find( 'div[data-tab-id="sportsNews"]');

findAll

Similar to find but will return all matches of the CSS selector

const allDivs = extremeHeadless.findAll( 'div'); // find all divs

if ( allDivs ) {
    allDivs.forEach ( ( entry ) => {
        // do something...
    } )
}

goto

goto simply goes to a page. It can be a relative path (i.e. relative to the baseURL you supply in the options object when you initialise extremeHeadless.)

Or, if can be a fully qualified URL (https://new.site.com)

The second parameter indicates whether you want to wait for the page to complete loading before returning.

// https://google.com has been provided in the options object.
await extremeHeadless.goto ( '/finance', true ); // go and wait

or...

await extremeHeadless.goto ( 'https://google.com/finance', true );

waitFor

This API will inspect the page and look for an element. If it is not found, it continues to check for a maximum of timeout seconds. The default timeout is specified in the options object when you call init. You can (optionally) override that here.

await extremeHeadless.waitFor( '.preview-file', 5 );  // timeout after 5 seconds.

Checkboxes and Selects

We saw above how to set a value on an input field. Checkboxes and selects are similar.

Determine if a checkbox is 'checked'.

if ( extremeHeadless.find( '#cb1').checked ) {
    console.log( 'is checked');
} else {
    console.log( 'is not checked');
}

Check it

extremeHeadless.find( '#cb1').checked = true;

Uncheck it

extremeHeadless.find( '#cb1').checked = false;

Get the selectedIndex of a select

<select id="select1">
    <option value="val1">Value1</option>
    <option value="val2">Value2</option>
    <option value="val3" selected>Value3</option>
    <option value="val4">Value4</option>
</select>

console.log(  extremeHeadless.find( '#select1').selectedIndex ); // yields 2

Iterate though a select

Given the HTML above...

 obj = extremeHeadless.find( '#select1');
let values = [];

for (let i = 0; i < obj.length; i++) {
    values.push( obj.options[ i ].value );
}
console.log(values);

This yields [ 'val1', 'val2', 'val3', 'val4' ]

And, if you wanted the 'text' of the select...

values = [];
for (let i = 0; i < obj.length; i++) {
    values.push( obj.options[ i ].text );
}
console.log(values);

This yields [ 'Value1', 'Value2', 'Value3', 'Value4' ]

Summary

As you can see, this is no different from doing what you probably do today when inspecting HTML elements with Javascript.

Simply get an element via find/findAll and operate on it the way you normally would using the same attributes (innerHTML...) as you do now. Or the same function calls such as click();

See the examples folder for runnable code.