What are the inner workings of the Selenium waitFor mechanism? - javascript

I am trying to customize the behavior of Selenium's click command, (via user-extentions.js), by intercepting calls to doClick(locator). Basically I need to delay click actions whenever our application's "busy indicator" is being displayed.
(Now the standard answer for this kind of thing is to insert a waitFor into the script for those situations. Indeed, we currently have zillions of them throughout our scripts. I'm trying to eliminate those.)
Detecting the page element is the trivial part. The tricky part is getting the script to actually wait. My promising looking, but failed attempt looks like this:
var nativeClick = Selenium.prototype.doClick;
Selenium.prototype.doClick = function(locator) {
this.doWaitForCondition("!selenium.browserbot.findElementOrNull('busy-indicator')", 5000);
return nativeClick.call(this, locator);
}
The doWaitForCondition gets called before every click, but it does not wait when the condition evaluates to false. nativeClick always gets called immediately, and so no delay is introduced. I suspect that the doWaitForCondition function doesn't actually do any waiting per se, but rather establishes the conditions for it within the command execution loop. And in this case the click command is already in play, and I'm trying to run a command within a command.
Can somebody shed some light on how Selenium command execution and waitFor works, or offer suggestions on how this might be done?

I have finally solved this. And with an approach that is much better than trying to intercept click processing in its various forms. My refined goal is: to delay execution of script command completion when our application is "busy".
How Selenium command processing works:
Upon completion, each selenium command returns an ActionResult object, (see ActionHandler.prototype.execute). The terminationCondition attribute on this object is a function that determines when it is okay for selenium to proceed to the next command, (TestLoop.prototype.continueTestWhenConditionIsTrue). Basically, selenium repeatedly executes the condition function until it yields true. The result object it quite trivial:
function ActionResult(terminationCondition) {
this.terminationCondition = terminationCondition;
}
Customizing it:
I want to delay execution any time myAppIsBusy() returns true. Of course all of the standard delays need to remain in place as well, like waiting for page loads, and explicit waitFor conditions as scripted. The solution is to redefine the selenium result object in my user-extensions.js, as follows:
function ActionResult(terminationCondition) {
this.terminationCondition = function() {
// a null terminationCondition means okay to continue
return (!terminationCondition || terminationCondition()) && !myAppIsBusy();
}
}
The great thing is that this is at a low enough level that it works for the IDE, as well as for RC.
Note that this does not affect Accessor or Assert command types, which return different result objects. But that should be fine, because those commands don't effect the state of the application.

Well, a look at the java drivers com.thoughtworks.selenium.Wait class reveals this:
public void wait(String message, long timeoutInMilliseconds, long intervalInMilliseconds) {
long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
long end = start + timeoutInMilliseconds;
while (System.currentTimeMillis() < end) {
if (until()) return;
try {
Thread.sleep(intervalInMilliseconds);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
}
throw new WaitTimedOutException(message);
}
I am not to deep into selenium but I excpect that every waitXXX Method points to this.
So, Selenium is working with Thread.sleep(). While this might not look like an ideal solution it shows at least that you cant make it worse by using Thread.sleep() on your own if neccessary. ;-)

Related

Asynchronously stopping a loop from outside node.js

I am using node.js 14 and currently have a loop that is made by a recursive function and a setTimeout, something like this:
this.timer = null;
async recursiveLoop() {
//Do Stuff
this.timer = setTimeout(this.recursiveLoop.bind(this), rerun_time);
}
But sometimes this loop gets stuck and I want it to automatically notice it, clean up and restart. So I tried doing something like this:
this.timer = null;
async recursiveLoop() {
this.long_timer = setTimeout(() => throw new Error('Taking too long!'), tooLong);
//Do Stuff
this.timer = setTimeout(this.recursiveLoop.bind(this), rerun_time);
}
main() {
//Do other asynchronous stuff
recursiveLoop()
.then()
.catch((e) => {
console.log(e.message);
cleanUp();
recursiveLoop();
}
}
I can't quite debug where it gets stuck, because it seems quite random and the program runs on a virtual machine. I still couldn't reproduce it locally.
This makeshift solution, instead of working, keeps crashing the whole node.js aplication, and now I am the one stuck. I have the constraint of working with node.js 14, without using microservices, and I never used child process before. I am a complete beginner. Please help me!
If you have a black box of code (which is all you've given us) with no way to detect errors on it and you just want to know when it is no longer generating results, you can put it in a child_process and ask the code in the child process to send you a message every time it runs an iteration. Then, in your main process, you can set a timer that resets itself every time it gets one of these "health" messages from the child. If the timer fires without getting a health message, then the child must be "stuck" because you haven't heard from it within your timeout time. You can then kill the child process at that point and restart it.
But, that is a giant hack. You should FIX the code that gets stuck or at least understand what's going on. Probably you're either leaking memory, file handles, database handles, running code that uses locks and messes up or there are unhandled errors happening. All are indications of code that should be fixed.

Is there any way to cleanly cancel asynchronous 'prompt' while it is waiting for input?

I'm working -- as an exercise -- on a Javascript game that involves a sequence of questions. I'm simply running it in Node, outputting to the console at the moment. I handle user input using the prompt package (https://www.npmjs.com/package/prompt).
All works fine except I also need to set a timeout on the length of time it takes to answer the question, and if the user exceeds that time, then move on to the next question. However at that point I am in the middle of prompt waiting for a response, and when I simply move on I start getting odd side effects, like typed input on the next round doubling up (and then on the next timeout tripling up) -- i.e. an s typed in yields sson the console.
Is there anyway with this package to cancel a prompt that is waiting for input? I looked through the documentation and didn't see a way. If not, do you know of a package that might provide this capability -- I looked and so far haven't found one.
I don't know if code helps, as the issue seems to be with the package itself, but here is what I'm doing:
A call for user input:
this.getUserName = function (callback) {
var schema = {
properties: {
name: {
description: "Tu nombre por favor:",
pattern: /^[áÁóÓíÍéÉñÑa-zA-Z\s\-]+$/,
message: 'Solo letras, por favor',
required: true
}
}
};
prompt.get(schema, callback);
};
when I call this I set up a timer using setTimeout
this.timer = setTimeout(this.timedOut.bind(this), this.ROUND_TIME);
this.prompter.getUserResponse(this.checkAnswer.bind(this));
when the timer times out I simply go on to a different piece of code, doing nothing to the prompt (which is still waiting), as I don't know how to "cancel" it…
I couldn't find a way to make it work with the NPM prompt package, but the package prompt-improved seems to have a timeout capability, although it's not well-documented.

How to initialize a child process with passed in functions in Node.js

Context
I'm building a general purpose game playing A.I. framework/library that uses the Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm. The idea is quite simple, the framework provides the skeleton of the algorithm, the four main steps: Selection, Expansion, Simulation and Backpropagation. All the user needs to do is plug in four simple(ish) game related functions of his making:
a function that takes in a game state and returns all possible legal moves to be played
a function that takes in a game state and an action and returns a new game state after applying the action
a function that takes in a game state and determines if the game is over and returns a boolean and
a function that takes in a state and a player ID and returns a value based on wether the player has won, lost or the game is a draw. With that, the algorithm has all it needs to run and select a move to make.
What I'd like to do
I would love to make use of parallel programming to increase the strength of the algorithm and reduce the time it needs to run each game turn. The problem I'm running into is that, when using Child Processes in NodeJS, you can't pass functions to the child process and my framework is entirely built on using functions passed by the user.
Possible solution
I have looked at this answer but I am not sure this would be the correct implementation for my needs. I don't need to be continually passing functions through messages to the child process, I just need to initialize it with functions that are passed in by my framework's user, when it initializes the framework.
I thought about one way to do it, but it seems so inelegant, on top of probably not being the most secure, that I find myself searching for other solutions. I could, when the user initializes the framework and passes his four functions to it, get a script to write those functions to a new js file (let's call it my-funcs.js) that would look something like:
const func1 = {... function implementation...}
const func2 = {... function implementation...}
const func3 = {... function implementation...}
const func4 = {... function implementation...}
module.exports = {func1, func2, func3, func4}
Then, in the child process worker file, I guess I would have to find a way to lazy load require my-funcs.js. Or maybe I wouldn't, I guess it depends how and when Node.js loads the worker file into memory. This all seems very convoluted.
Can you describe other ways to get the result I want?
child_process is less about running a user's function and more about starting a new thread to exec a file or process.
Node is inherently a single-threaded system, so for I/O-bound things, the Node Event Loop is really good at switching between requests, getting each one a little farther. See https://nodejs.org/en/docs/guides/event-loop-timers-and-nexttick/
What it looks like you're doing is trying to get JavaScript to run multiple threads simultaniously. Short answer: can't ... or rather it's really hard. See is it possible to achieve multithreading in nodejs?
So how would we do it anyway? You're on the right track: child_process.fork(). But it needs a hard-coded function to run. So how do we get user-generated code into place?
I envision a datastore where you can take userFn.ToString() and save it to a queue. Then fork the process, and let it pick up the next unhandled thing in the queue, marking that it did so. Then write to another queue the results, and this "GUI" thread then polls against that queue, returning the calculated results back to the user. At this point, you've got multi-threading ... and race conditions.
Another idea: create a REST service that accepts the userFn.ToString() content and execs it. Then in this module, you call out to the other "thread" (service), await the results, and return them.
Security: Yeah, we just flung this out the window. Whether you're executing the user's function directly, calling child_process#fork to do it, or shimming it through a service, you're trusting untrusted code. Sadly, there's really no way around this.
Assuming that security isn't an issue you could do something like this.
// Client side
<input class="func1"> // For example user inputs '(gamestate)=>{return 1}'
<input class="func2">
<input class="func3">
<input class="func4">
<script>
socket.on('syntax_error',function(err){alert(err)});
submit_funcs_strs(){
// Get function strings from user input and then put into array
socket.emit('functions',[document.getElementById('func1').value,document.getElementById('func2').value,...
}
</script>
// Server side
// Socket listener is async
socket.on('functions',(funcs_strs)=>{
let funcs = []
for (let i = 0; i < funcs_str.length;i++){
try {
funcs.push(eval(funcs_strs));
} catch (e) {
if (e instanceof SyntaxError) {
socket.emit('syntax_error',e.message);
return;
}
}
}
// Run algorithm here
}

Qt function runJavaScript() does not execute JavaScript code

I am trying to implement the displaying of a web page in Qt. I chose to use the Qt WebEngine to achieve my task. Here's what I did :
Wrote a sample web page consisting of a empty form.
Wrote a JS file with just an API to create a radio button inside the form.
In my code, it looks like this :
View = new QWebEngineView(this);
// read the js file using qfile
file.open("path to jsFile");
myJsApi = file.Readall();
View->page()->runjavascript (myjsapi);
View->page()->runjavascript ("createRadioButton(\"button1\");");
I find that the runJavaScript() function has no effect on the web page. I can see the web page in the output window, but the radio button I expected is not present. What am I doing wrong?
I think you will have to connect the signal loadFinished(bool) of your page() to a slot, then execute runJavaScript() in this slot.
void yourClass::mainFunction()
{
View = new QWebEngineView(this);
connect( View->page(), SIGNAL(loadFinished(bool)), this, SLOT(slotForRunJS(bool)));
}
void yourClass::slotForRunJS(bool ok)
{
// read the js file using qfile
file.open("path to jsFile");
myJsApi = file.Readall();
View->page()->runJavaScript(myjsapi);
View->page()->runJavaScript("createRadioButton(\"button1\");");
}
I had this problem, runJavascript didn't have any effect. I had to put some html content into the view (with page().setHtml("") before running it.
Check the application output, it might contain JavaScript errors. Even if your JS code is valid, you might encounter the situation where the script is run before DOMContentLoaded event, that is document.readyState == 'loading'. Therefore, the DOM might not be available yet, as well as variables or functions provided by other scripts. If you depend on them for your code to run, when you detect this readyState, either wait for the event or try calling the function later, after a timeout. The second approach with timeout might be needed if you need to get the result of the code execution, as this can be done only synchronously.

Is there a way to log the JavaScript stack trace without putting breakpoints?

I would like to be able to perform manipulations on a given JS app, and then simply get a large log of all the functions that have been called. This is possible in Chrome, but only if one puts a breakpoint somewhere. My problem is when I am reverse-engineering a given website (only for self-teaching purposes, of course) it often takes me a whole lot of time to figure out where to even start from. Something like that will help me tremendously because I will no longer have to search within the code, rather, I will just do a user action, and grab the stack log afterwards.
I suppose that there should be a way to intercept (or wrap) every function call, so that it is dumped to the log before the function is called.
Try this article:
http://eriwen.com/javascript/stacktrace-update/
or this post:
http://ivan-ghandhi.livejournal.com/942493.html
and, probably, this: How can I get a Javascript stack trace when I throw an exception?
In Firebug, you can use the profiler to log every function called. Use console.profile() and console.profileEnd() to trigger it programatically.
However, this will not give you proper stack traces. (Are you sure that's what you want?)
To log methods of specific objects, you can overwrite them like so:
for (var key in obj) {
if (typeof obj[key] == 'function') {
(function(){
var origFun = obj[key];
obj[key] = function () {
var result = origFun.apply(this, arguments);
console.log('call to method', key, 'with arguments', arguments,' - Result:', result);
// console.trace(); // for a trace with every call
return result;
};
})();
}
}
Maybe aspect oriented programming (AOP) can provide an answer. I just found out about aspectJS which could help intercept and log function calls
You can use dynatrace. Dynatrace is a profiling tool for IE and FF. Dynatrace can monitor your application while it is running, and then serves you a timeline of all what happened. In the timeline, there is blocks representing the javascript activity. You can right-click on it (purepath), and then walk through the whole call stack. You can export that to excel or other If you want.
You can add markers in your code, those markers will appear on the timeline and in the purepath:
if(typeof(_dt_addMark)!="undefined") _dt_addMark('MyCustomTimerName');
alternatively, if you only want to find "a way to intercept (or wrap) every function call",
there is a low-tech solution, if you are using a real webbapp (single-load javascript app):
bookmarklets
With bookmarklets, once you have loaded your page, you can execute some custom javascript. So what you can do there, is to override the functions methods that you want to observe with the same function containing logging (so just copy and paste the function, and add some console.log in there). This actually works even with native js functions.

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