Selenium script playback

Currently using webpagetest only single pages are tested.

I feel there would there be benefit in being able to replay a user journey through the site, in terms of front end performance. More so as websites move further into ajax territory.

It would be cool to be able to upload a selenium script of a web-site use case and have webpagetest replay the journey and analyse the front-end performance.

The choice of selenium (http://seleniumhq.org) was a personal one, there may well be other better frameworks out there.

Pagetest (the underlying code, not the web UI) supports a fairly rich scripting interface. The documentation for it is available here: [url=http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/pagetest/index.php?title=Scripting]Pagetest download | SourceForge.net and we use it extensively for testing things like mail, shopping, search and other multi-step transactions.

WebPagetest offers a reduced capability where the full scripting language is available but it can only record the performance information, screen shots and video from one of the steps. The documentation for it is available here: [url=http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/pagetest/index.php?title=Hosted_Scripting]Pagetest download | SourceForge.net.

The main reason the hosted version doesn’t support multi-step transactions is that I haven’t figured out how to present the results in the UI (particularly if you are doing more than 1 run). I do have a ticket open to implement it but it hasn’t bubbled up to the top yet: [url=http://dev.webpagetest.org/pagetest/ticket/16]http://dev.webpagetest.org/pagetest/ticket/16[/url]

As to the scripting language, I really like selenium and spent quite a bit of time looking at it before I implemented something but there were technical limitations with how it interacted with IE that prevented me from using it (specifically, you needed to run the testing through a proxy to inject the javascript but that alters how the browser makes requests). It may be worth re-visiting at some point to see if I can inject the code for selenium directly but since I have something that works it hasn’t been a high priority.

Thanks,

-Pat

Would a suggestion be to only allow a user to specify one step in the multi-step transaction script as being the recorded/presented step?
This would then allow you to utilise the existing ui display for a single page and unlock the power of the scripting language for webpagetest.

Cheers
Cal

That’s essentially how the hosted scripting works though you have to do it manually by modifying the script to only record one of the steps but it will still run the full script.

thanks for the reply. I realise now that we just suggested the way it actually works back to you. doh! (again) & apologies.

Hello Friends.
Ajax provides a great utility to web developer and vast number of functionalites too.
I would like to know some interesting scripts from you guys, so please do share
some of your scripting experience with us.
Thanks for your post and stay connect.