In the current Selenium space there are lot of developments are happening. One of the most asked questions in the internet is how to design extensible and most easy frame work that can be suited for different kinds of testing platforms such as desktop, mobile.

Selenium with C# is not that common in the current freeware market era. But its worth knowing about how it can be implemented so that we can future ready. C# is now becoming language for building all kinds of apps including mobile. Having knowledge on C# selenium will bring us more opportunities for a devops engineer.

With that preface, I will try to create a logical flow of learning. Lets look at following areas one by one to achieve our goal of learning.

I typically go with bare minimum requirements to create the framework assuming readers know the basics of any object oriented programming language. So I am starting with concepts familiar but implemented little different in C#.

• Basics of C# interfaces and setters and getters.
• Basics of Interface design pattern for framework creation.
• MS visual studio nuget packages required and drivers required for selenium
• Driver factory or thread safe driver creation
• NUnit testing framework bare minimum to Create basic google search test with Nunit

In this blog lets start with first section.

C# provides the important feature of setting and getting the class properties. There are auto properties which are really useful and takes care of the coding.

Setters sets the properties and getter will get you the properties. Following is the example of setters and getters. This is widely used and need to be understood while working with C#

public class test
{
private string _anyproperty;
public string AnyProperty
{
get{return _anyproperty;}
set{ _anyproperty = value;}
}
}

In the above example we can declare private variable and use it to assign and return. This is same as setting auto properties like below in C#.

public class test
{
public string AnyProperty
{
get;set;
}
}

Class properties can be set inside class or out side the class using the class object.
The properties are quite useful in designing the framework. Usually anything we want to set for the entire class such as file path for the excel operations class, file path for the browser driver class etc, this same path can be used in the class methods.

In the next section we will see how interfaces can be used to create portable and readable code.

Interface is generally known as contract agreement. It signs the contract with implementing classes. I.E it enforces the method definitions for implementing class.

The underlying code can differ with different class implementations.

In view of our selenium, let’s take the example of Browser driver, the IWebDriver interface holds the method definitions and all driver classes such as ChromeDriver, FireFoxDriver , IEDriver classes implements the methods in IWebDriver interface.

To understand how we can make use of interfaces to create clean code while designing the C# frame work, lets look at browser object creation.

In C# selenium browser object can be initialized similar to Java. To initialize browser object we need two objects

• Browser Service
• Browser Options or Capabilities.
  • IWebDriver ChromeDriver = new ChromeDriver ((ChromeDriverService)service, (ChromeOpions)capabilities, timeout)
  • IWebDriver FireFoxDriver = new FireFox ((FireFoxDriverService)service, (FireFoxOpions)capabilities, timeout)
  • IWebDriver InternetExplorerDriver = new InternetExplorerDriver((InternetExplorerDriverService)service, (InternetExplorerOptions)options, timeout)

If we look at all three initialization, in fact all driver classes implementing IWebDriver have these three parameters two of which are class objects.

It makes sense for us to utilize the interface concept here and create IDriver interface which have two methods (Service object creation and capabilities/option object creation)

This will enforce for all types of driver objects to implement these methods.

Lets end the first part here, and in the next part, will dive deep and create framework using MS visual studio.

Design Selenium Framework with C# – Part 2