Is there a way to visually see if htmlunit is performing the correct commands?

Question

Is there a way to visually see if htmlunit is performing the correct commands? I have a hard requirement to use htmlunit. I just don't know if it's filling out all the form correctly.

Answer 1

HTMLunit is designed to be GUI less browser and for your requirements you can consider using Webdriver or Watir or Selenium etc such tools. In case you are in to Ruby, take a look at Celerity which wrapped HtmlUnit in a Watir-ish API; In fact Celerity is itself being wrapped by Culerity, which integrates Celerity and Cucumber and that could be of more interest to you.

Answer 2

What do you mean by "correct commands"? HtmlUnit itself won't give you a running description of what it's doing, if that's what you mean. As suthasankar says, HtmlUnit is a headless browser (intentionally so) and will never give you the cool Watir experience of watching pages fly by.

Any time I've wanted to know what's happening during a test's execution, I have added logging statements at various points in the test code and then watched them in the console. You could send messages to any other monitoring system you instead.

It wouldn't take much to then write wrappers around the "commands" you're interested in, like "getPage" and button clicks and form entries and the like.

Answer 3

It's not possible to view what HtmlUnit is doing unless you code logging and some sort of display yourself. I have done this in the past, and it's helpful to a certain degree but it's not really possible to have a visual feedback to see what HtmlUnit is doing. Even with logging, it's not possible to know every single detail what HtmlUnit is doing or where it goes wrong, so it's an extremely time consuming task. I even resorted to outputting the current page viewed but this is pretty limited as an html page cannot tell the actual "commands" HtmlUnit is executing on that page.

Another approach would be to use Selenium, which executes your "commands" in a visual manner you can see where things go wrong instantly by watching it.