Testing a file streaming with selenium?

Question

Is it possible to test a webpage which supports an export mechanism? This export mechanism streams the data displayed in a table via xml to the user. For now it's sufficient to test if the streaming works and the user receives a file, regardless of the file content. Any ideas how I can achieve this with selenium?

Answer 1

If you're using Selenium script by itself, this would be hard, if not impossible. Luckily, you can run selenium from Java, C# and more and have it integrate with JUnit, NUnit or your favorite unit testing framework. If you use one of these languages, you could use it to cause selenium to export the file to a specific location, then use C#/Java to actually go out on the file system and verify that the file was correctly exported to the location, and do any other validation on it.

For doing this development, you can typically find all the client libraries under the bin directory of Selenium server. If you're using Selenium IDE, you can even export your test cases to C#, Java, Ruby, or whatever else, or just use it as an example to manually write your own in code.

Hope that helps!