For CFSelenium Users: An Ant Script to Transcribe Your Tests For Multiple Browsers

The easiest way to create a CFSelenium test case is to use the Selenium IDE plugin for Firefox to compose the test, then export the test using the export formatter Bob Silverberg included in the CFSelenium project.  You end up with a test that can be run against Firefox but can be further customized to your needs.

Of course the beauty of CFSelenium is that it lets you run those tests against browsers other than Firefox, to conduct cross-browser testing.  But who wants to create multiple copies of the original tests, or edit the test files whenever you want to check them against another browser?

Not this guy.

So I went ahead and created an Ant script that will take the CFSelenium tests generated for Firefox and transcribe them to work for other browsers I wanted to test against.  The script includes configuration properties that allow you to customize the browser settings to your environment.  For example, I needed the script to be able to rewrite my Internet Explorer tests to run IE on a virtual machine rather than on localhost.  I also took what I learned about capturing screenshots using CFSelenium and added a nice screenshot management feature to the script:  if you add one or more captureScreenshot or captureEntirePageScreenshot statements to your tests, the script will make sure you're using the correct statement for the particular browser, will rewrite the statement to place the screenshot files in a particular directory, and will add code that will incrementally name the screenshot images so you can take and preserve multiple screenshots for one or more tests.

I've put this Ant script up on GitHub at https://github.com/bcswartz/CFSelenium-Cross-Browser-Converter-Ant-Script.  The Ant file itself provides a lot of guidance on how to configure and use the script and some hints on using CFSelenium in general.  Hopefully it's usable even by folks who aren't completely comfortable with Ant.  I myself am still something of an Ant noob:  I'm sure there are more elegant ways of writing this script, and Ant gurus are welcome to fork the GitHub repo and make improvements.