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I'm having a hard time grasping the methods I see used to unit test UI functionality for a website (in this case, using ASP.NET MVC3). I tried using Watin, which, in a general sense what I want, with the exception of having to rely an actual instance of a web browser in order to make it work, as it complicates the whole process quite a bit, especially with CI.

In my ideal world this is how I imagine a test working:

  1. Pass a model to a view, get the output
  2. Populate a programmatic DOM with the view output
  3. The test would trigger DOM events to simulate clicking a button, for example, and verify that the DOM was manipulated in the expected way.

I realize this would require both a javascript engine and a DOM implementation either written in .NET or with .NET bindings. Does an obvious solution to my problem exist? If not, is there anything particularly dumb/wrong about the way I'd like to go about it?

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What you are describing is known as a headless browser - XBrowser is one such effort, though the last check-in dates from April 2010.

Also see this post on using HtmlUnit in .NET development.

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3 Comments

I think you got me pointed in the right direction. I'm looking at phantomJS now to see if it's I could reasonably integrate.
@w.brian - Knowing what to search for is half the job these days ;)
Ain't that the truth! I'm really surprised a .NET solution doesn't already exist considering how insanely useful it would be. Perhaps I will look into cloning XBrowser and attempt to get it working.

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