Screenshot tours¶

A screenshot tour is a virtual tour of a Lino site using Selenium to look around and watch into every corner, taking screenshots on the go. Before leaving, the tour also writes an index.rst file that lists the screenshot images.

Screenshot tours could become an integral part of the Lino test suite because generating them fails when something at the web interface is broken. They are not yet run automatically because things seem to be more complicated than expected. How to test whether all Ajax requests are finished? How to find the elements? At the moment it seems that these tests depend much on the version of Selenium or the browser driver. Until these problems are fixed, we run each tour manually as described below.

Every screenshot tour is defined in a maketour.py file.

Screenshot tours are done using the lino.api.selenium module.

Usage example:

$ go noi1e
$ python manage.py run maketour.py

The result of above example is published as A tour of the Noi/ExtJS demo project.

maketour.py¶: By convention, the default tour of a demo project is in a file named maketour.py.

Implementation note: The tricky part was to figure out how to start a runserver in background, run some arbitrary code and then terminate the server proces. We create a subprocess.Popen object that will execute runserver, then we must call communicate() to let it live (but we do this in a thread in background), and finally we call terminate() to let it die in peace.

Running a maketour.py script usually leaves a file geckodriver.log which might contain interesting information.

TODO: compare the generated snapshots with those of a “reviewed” result from an earlier version. Use PIL.ImageChops.difference (see here for ideas). Generate a second page diffs.rst for every tour, to report these differences so that a human reviewer can decide whether the new result is acceptable or not.