Automated browsing with javascript?

Question

I'm trying to do some browser automation, but I'm having some problems. Basically, what I'd like to do is load a set pages, set some forms options, click a button and view the results for each page that I open. Originally, I tried to do this by placing the pages I wanted to automate in iframes and then using javascript to drive the interactions I want in each, but that results in a Permissions Error, since the sites I want to automate are not on my server. Is there any way around this? The other possibility I've thought of is to use QT's webkit class and the evaluateJavaScript method to accomplish what I'd like to do, but this seems a bit more heavy weight for something that is, conceptually, pretty simple.

Answer 1

Check out Selenium: http://seleniumhq.org/. It lets you automate Firefox and is probably the easiest to get start with.

Answer 2

Are you trying to do test automation? If so, there are plenty frameworks for that, like Selenium, WatiN, WebAii and even that built in Visual Studio.

Some of them (WebAii is my favorite) allow you to launch test in a real browser like FireFox.

If a peace of software you searching for is more like form filler, than take a look at iMacros, thay have a complete browser-side scriptable solution.

Answer 3

The tasks that I wanted to accomplish weren't really test related, so a lot of the test-frameworks don't fit the use case that I had in mind (I did try to use Selenium, but ran into problems). I ended up doing what I mentioned in original question and injecting javascript into pages through QT. This ended up working pretty well, although it was a pain to debug, since the javascript had to be passed in as a string and the base environment provided by QT's webkit class doesn't reveal a whole lot.