A 'saving…' or 'loading…' popup or any type of interaction preventing mask is a common UX pattern in my opinion in javascripts heavy apps.
We didn't care about testing the popup at all, it was just breaking our other tests in the following way.
In our UI you could click a 'save' button, then a 'saving…' popup appears, meanwhile the 'save' button goes away and an 'edit' button appears (behind the popup), and when the response comes back it says 'Saved.' in the ui.
A test for `$('div=Saved.').toExist()` in wdio works, it does a waitFor under the covers and polls the UI until that text appears. It doesn't care if theres a popup shown or not.
However moving on to the next step in the tests, `$('button=Edit').click()` throws an error 'element is not clickable' if the popup is visible when it happens to runs. Doing multi-command steps like 'check if popup is there, if not click' in general doesn't work as theres so much latency between commands. You can inject javascript in to the page that does both checks in the browsers js process as a hacky workaround.
We did upgrade our webdriver library partly to get waitForClickable() which based on the name at least sounded like it handle the above, but there were no volunteers to update the 168 instances where waitForLoader() had spread in the codebase :/
We invested a large amount of time in them recently, and I agree they are terrible to write. We dare not even turn on IE or any other browser, we can't even keep the tests green in Firefox. Really wish we'd used cypress instead as its 100x easier to debug and we're not getting cross-browser benefits anyways.
The underlying architecture is a bad design for heavy javascript apps in my opinion. The roundtrips between the test runner talking to selenium server talking to selenium driver in a browser and back the other way is slow and so much can change on the page in between steps in your tests. Cypress runs your test code in the javascript process of your browser so I believe theres no or minimal roundtrip lag.
We use `waitFor()` for the UI to stabilize but thats been a hard mental model for devs to follow and as a result we have tons of unnecessary waits in the tests which slows them down. Even things like waiting for a loading modal to disappear before trying to interact with the UI is hard since your code:
`waitFor('.loading-modal', false) // wait for it NOT to exist`
may run BEFORE its even appeared, then fail in the next step when you try clicking on a button and the modal is there now. You can't wait for it to appear first to prevent that, as your code may run after its already come and gone too.
Tons of annoyances or strange behavior like chromedriver doesn't support emojis in inputs, ieDriver had select boxes set value broken at one point, setValue('123') on a field actually does something like 'focus, clear, blur, APPEND 123' so blur logic to set a default value of '0' on your field will result in the final value being '0123' in your tests… just the worst.
- A Sr. Marketing staff member saw technical deficiencies in the project and pulled a _complete 180°_ literally days before showtime in front of a huge client, successfully.
- Jobs pushed his workers hard.. though the ends justify the means
- The NeXT computer pioneered nearly everything we take for granted today (mouse, networking, Objective C) in a package targeted at the high end consumer. Sound familiar?
I think the single quotes are correct, and are whats in my history. I think they're arguments to the zmv program, which itself does the expansion and $1 substitutions. Otherwise I think that $1 would be substituted once when you run it instead of for each file.
I've used zmv to also reorganize the directory structure of files too, something that seems easier to do with its glob/variable replace syntax.
Nice to have a cross platform option for usage in scripts though.