Actions

Available in bb-core since version 2.0.0

Overview

Since 2.0 we provide an Actions mechanism, that can be utilized to build… well, actions in a unified way :). They can be executed the same way, using a single ActionController.

This way, we’ve got rid of multiple helpers, utilities or very specialized page objects that you had to know about in the first place :).

What can be an action? Basically any set of instructions you like to wrap together to provide a more concise DSL, e.g. creating a new page.

Types of actions

There are two types of actions, defined by following interfaces:

• Action
• ActionWithData

Simple actions

Action describes the simplest type of actions. It is defined in an execute() method:

class MyAction implements Action {
  @Override
  public void execute() {
    //my action
  }
}

Next, you need to bind it in your Guice module using the appropriate MapBinder.

Actions should be bound to their String identifier, which will allow to easily reference them in the future.

  // for Action
    MapBinder<String, Action> actions = MapBinder.newMapBinder(binder(), String.class, Action.class);
    actions.addBinding("My action").to(MyAction.class);

Actions with data

The ActionWithData interface serves more advanced types of actions that need to consume some additional data. It is defined in an execute(T data) method:

class MyActionWitData implements ActionWitData<MyData> {
  @Override
  public void execute(MyData data) {
    //my action
  }
}

Same with Action, you need to provide appropriate bindings in your module:

  // for ActionWithData
  MapBinder<String, ActionWithData> actionsWithData = MapBinder.newMapBinder(binder(), String.class, ActionWithData.class);
  actionsWithData.addBinding("My action with data").to(MyActionWithData.class);

Injecting PageObjects

Thanks to the fact that the actions are bound with the MapBinder, you can utilize all of Bobcat’s functionality inside of them. One of them is e.g. using page objects, with their appropriate scope.

An example, from Bobcat’s internals:

package com.cognifide.qa.bb.aem.core.siteadmin.actions;

@PageObject
public class CreatePageAction implements ActionWithData<CreatePageActionData> {

  @FindPageObject
  private SiteToolbar toolbar;

  @Override
  public void execute(CreatePageActionData data) {
    toolbar.createPage(data.getTemplate(), data.getTitle(), data.getPageName());
  }
}

Please note, that as with regular page objects, you need to annotate the action with the @PageObject. Thanks to that, Bobcat will pick up and handle its specific decorators, like the @FindPageObject above.

Decorating actions with Allure annotations

You can utilize the capabilities of the Allure reporting engine and make the reports even more readable when implementing your own actions.

It just takes a single annotation, @Step:

package com.cognifide.qa.bb.aem.core.siteadmin.actions;

@PageObject
public class CreatePageAction implements ActionWithData<CreatePageActionData> {

  @FindPageObject
  private SiteToolbar toolbar;

  @Override
  @Step("Create page {data.title} with name {data.pageName} using {data.template} template")
  public void execute(CreatePageActionData data) {
    toolbar.createPage(data.getTemplate(), data.getTitle(), data.getPageName());
  }
}

and after executing your action, you will get the following in the report:

Executing actions

After implementing one of the two above interfaces, we need a way to execute it! ActionController will help us with that :).

We simply inject it in our test class and execute the action, referencing it with the corresponding identifier:

@Inject
private ActionController actions;

actions.execute("MyAction");
actions.execute("MyActionWithData", new MyData("some data"));

Custom controllers

If for some reason you’re not happy with the default controller shipped with Bobcat, you can simply provide your own implementation and then override the ActionsModule module bindings with your own.