FlexMonkey :: Flex UI Testing Tool

We’ve been getting a lot of requests about integrating FlexMonkey with Selenium to provide testing of “hybrid” test scenarios involving both Flex and non-Flex web apps. It is of course common to embed Flex applications within web pages that also contain non-Flex, HTML components, and the combined Flex and non-Flex pieces together produce a single user experience and workflow. Ideally, such hybrid user interface scenarios could be automated within a single test case. In fact, many times the functional dependencies between Flex and non-Flex components make it impossible to test one without the other.

While we’ve been hearing about many efforts to combine FlexMonkey with Selenium to provide for such hybrid testing, we’re not aware of anything having yet been made publicly available, and having just completed development of FoneMonkey (which we’re officially announcing tomorrow), and FlexMonkey 1.0GA (which we’re releasing in about a week), we’ve had some time to take a look ourselves at how we might go about integrating Selenium with The Monkey.

After exploring various permutations, we hit upon a very robust approach through which we “slave” FlexMonkey recording and playback beneath Selenium. We have created a bridge, which we are provisionally calling FlexMonkium, that forwards FlexMonkey commands to Selenium during recording, and forwards FlexMonkey commands from Selenium to FlexMonkey during playback. Such FlexMonkey recording and playback is seamlessly interleaved with native Selenium recording and playback to easily produce hybrid testing scenarios. For example, in a single recording session you can click on HTML components and Flex components, even across multiple browser pages, with the resulting FlexMonkey and Selenium commands being recorded into a single Selenium script which (with the aid of the FlexMonkium bridge) can then be played back with any Selenium runner.

We are fairly confident we’ll have something ready for early access in a matter of weeks! If you’d like to get your hands on FlexMonkium as soon as possible, contact us here.