Optimized Way for Data Parameterization in TestNG

Question

I am trying to create a framework using selenium and TestNG. As a part of the framework i am trying to implement Data Parameterization. But i am confused about optimized way of implementing Data parameterization. Here is the following approaches i made.

1. With Data Providers (from excel i am reading and storing in object[][])
2. With testng.xml

Issues with Data Providers:

1. Lets say if my Test needs to handle large volumes of data , say 15 different data, then i need to pass 15 parameters to it. Alternative , if i try to create a class TestData to handle this parameters and maintain in it , then for every Test there will be different data sets. so my TestData class will be filled with more than 40 different params.

Eg: In a Ecom Web site , There will be many different params exists like for Accounts , cards , Products , Rewards , History , store Locations etc., for this we may need atleast 40 different params need to declared in Test Data.Which i am thinking not a suggestable solution. Some other tests may need sometimes 10 different test data, some may need 12 . Even some times in a single test one iteration i need only 7 params in other iteration i need 12 params .

How do i manage it effectively?

Issues with Testng.xml

Maintaining 20 different accounts , 40 different product details , cards , history all in a single xml file and configuring test suite like parallel execution , configuring only particular classes to execute etc., all together will mess the testng.xml file

So can you please suggest which is a optimized way to handle data in Testing Framework . How in real time the data parameterization , iterations with different test datas will be handled

Answer 1

I'm actually currently trying to do the same (or similar) thing. I write automation to validate product data on several eComm sites.

My old method

The data comes in Excel sheet format that I process slightly to get in a format that I want. I run the automation that reads from Excel and executes the runs sequentially.

My new method (so far, WIP)

My company recently started using SauceLabs so I started prototyping ways to take advantage of X # of VMs in parallel and see the same issues as you. This isn't a polished or even a finished solution. It's something I'm currently working on but I thought I would share some of what I'm doing to see if it will help you.

I started reading SauceLabs docs and ran across the sample code below which started me down the path.

https://github.com/saucelabs-sample-scripts/C-Sharp-Selenium/blob/master/SaucePNUnit_Test.cs

I'm using NUnit and I found in their docs a way to pass data into the test that allows parallel execution and allows me to store it all neatly in another class.

https://github.com/nunit/docs/wiki/TestFixtureSource-Attribute

This keeps me from having a bunch of [TextFixture] tags stacked on top of my script class (as in the demo code above). Right now I have,

[TestFixtureSource(typeof(Configs), "StandardBrowsers")]
[Parallelizable]
public class ProductSetupUnitTest

where the Configs class contains an object[] called StandardBrowsers like

public class Configs
{
    static object[] StandardBrowsers =
        {
            new object[] { "chrome", "latest", "windows 10", "Product Name1", "Product ID1" },
            new object[] { "chrome", "latest", "windows 10", "Product Name2", "Product ID2" },
            new object[] { "chrome", "latest", "windows 10", "Product Name3", "Product ID3" },
            new object[] { "chrome", "latest", "windows 10", "Product Name4", "Product ID4" },
        };

I actually got this working this morning so I know now the approach will work and I'm working on ways to further tweak and improve it.

So, in your case you would just load up the object[] with all the data you want to pass. You will probably have to declare a string for each of the possible fields you might want to pass. If you don't need that particular field in this run, then pass empty string.

My next step is to load the object[] by loading the data from Excel. The pain for me is how to do logging. I have a pretty mature logging system in my existing sequential execution script. It's going to be hard to give that up or setting for something with reduced functionality. Currently I write everything to a CSV, load that into Excel, and then I can quickly process failures using Excel filtering, etc. My current thought is to have each script write it's own CSV and then pull them all together after all the runs are complete. That part is still theoretical right now though.

Hope this helps. Feel free to ask me questions if something isn't clear. I'll answer what I can.

Answer 2

Assuming that every test knows what sort of test data it is going to be receiving here's what I would suggest that you do :

• Have your testng suite xml file pass in the file name from which data is to be read to the data provider.
• Build your data provider such that it receives the file name from which to read via TestNG parameters and then builds a generic map as test data iteration (Every test will receive its parameters as a key,value pair map) and then work with the passed in map.

This way you will just one data provider which can literally handle anything. You can make your data provider a bit more sophisticated by having it deal with test methods and then provide the values accordingly.

Here's a skeleton implementation of what I am talking about.

public class DataProviderExample {

    @Test (dataProvider = "dp")
    public void testMethod(Map<String, String> testdata) {
        System.err.println("****" + testdata);
    }

    @DataProvider (name = "dp")
    public Object[][] getData(ITestContext ctx) {
        //This line retrieves the value of <parameter name="fileName" value="/> from within the
        //<test> tag of the suite xml file.
        String fileName = ctx.getCurrentXmlTest().getParameter("fileName");
        List<Map<String, String>> maps = extractDataFrom(fileName);
        Object[][] testData = new Object[maps.size()][1];
        for (int i = 0; i < maps.size(); i++) {
            testData[i][0] = maps.get(i);
        }
        return testData;
    }

    private static List<Map<String, String>> extractDataFrom(String file) {
        List<Map<String, String>> maps = Lists.newArrayList();
        maps.add(Maps.newHashMap());
        maps.add(Maps.newHashMap());
        maps.add(Maps.newHashMap());
        return maps;
    }
}