Protractor for Front-End Testing of Angular JS Development

How AngularJS developers are able to produce wonderful apps? Why do their apps get popular?

Questions like this hooked us up, even any AngularJS developer to know more.

End-to-End testing is an aged approach to enhance the user experience, whether AngularJS developers are developing a software, website, or application.

To offer an excellent user experience, the AngularJS developers perform end-to-end testing for their applications by using tools like Protractor.

Let’s see what a protractor is.

Introduction

Protractor is developed on the top of WebDriverJS, which is responsible for using browser-specific drivers and native events in order to interact with the applications as a user would.

Protractor also supports locator strategies based on Angular, which offers you to test the Angular-specific elements without initiating any setup.

This article will walk you through the front-end testing of AngularJS development.

What is Protractor?

Protractor is an automation testing tool for web applications frontend testing. Isn’t it amazing that this tool works with both Angular and Non-Angular JS development as a solution integrator combining powerful technologies like Selenium, Jasmine, web driver, and many more others? This tool is meant not only to test Angular JS development but also for writing automated regression tests for normal web applications as well.

Angular JS applications have some further hypertext markup language attributes like ng-repeater, ng-controller, ng-model, etc. which are not available in selenium locators. Selenium is unable to identify those web elements using Selenium code. So, the drafting instrument on the highest of Selenium will handle and control those attributes in web applications.

Protractor runs tests against AngularJS developer’s application running during a real browser, interacting with it as a user would.

Why Do We Need Protractor?

There are a lot of factors that lead us to the need for Protractor. Here are some of the key factors:

No need to add waits/sleeps

As the webpage finishes pending tasks, protractor executes the next steps of the testing process by automatically connecting with the AngularJS application. In other words, AngularJS developers don’t need to add waits to your script manually. Protractor will automatically wait for the web elements to load and only then executes the next step.

Simple syntax to write test cases

This tool has the ability to export a global function element, which takes a locator and will return an ElementFinder. This ElementFinder has a set of action methods, such as click(),getText(),sendKeys(),etc.

This is the core of how to interact with the element and get information from it. This global function helps to cut back the element locating syntax. Take a look at the following statement to locate the element in both Selenium web driver and Protractor:

Selenium web driver:

driver.FindElement(By.cssSelector(“css selector”));

Protractor:

element(by.css(“some-css”));

Angular Specific Locators

This tool offers some new locator strategies and functions to help locate the Angular elements.

Such as:

By.binding, By.repeater, By.textarea, By.model, WebElement.all, WebElement.evaluate, etc.

These locator strategies and functions automate the testing of AngularJS development. Protractor works in conjunction with Selenium to supply an automatic check infrastructure.

Supports behavior-driven development

Protractor is a wrapper around WebDriver JS and supports behavior-driven development frameworks like Jasmine, Mocha, Cucumber, etc.

Run multiple browsers

Protractor makes use of Selenium grid to run multiple browsers like firefox, chrome, safari, Internet Explorer at once. That means this tool has the ability to run the same scripts in mobile browsers also without the need to change the code.

Page Object

It is easy to set up page objects. Protractor doesn’t perform web driver commands till an action is needed, i.e., set up page objects so that tests can operate page elements without moving the HTML.

Which Framework To Use?

There are two Behavior-driven development (BDD) test frameworks supported by Protractor. These frameworks are as follows:

• Jasmine: When the Protractor is installed, you get the Jasmine test framework by default.
• Mocha: It is a JavaScript test framework that runs on Node.JS. While working with the Mocha test framework, you have to set it with the Protractor and use the Chai Assertions and Behavior Driven Development interface with Chai.

Conclusion

After going through this article, you would be able to make Protractor work like a charm and can use it to the fullest for AngularJS websites. It will ease you up in the front-end development process. Please provide your valuable feedback in the comment section below.