clicknium-docs VS Playwright

We started a project called Clicknium this year, a Python automation library for browser and desktop applications. It depends on the Clicknium browser extension to control the browser, and simulate mouse and keyboard actions. Since January 2022, adding new extensions based on Manifest V2 to the Chrome Web Store has been forbidden. All extensions on Manifest V2 will stop working in early 2023, even those that were added to Chrome Web Store earlier.

In this case, attaching the existing browser is necessary for the automation script to handle the same browser which human works on. We are introducing the browser attaching method for different automation libraries here, containing Selenium, Playwright, and Clicknium.

Clicknium is a Python GUI automation library that supports both desktop and web browser automation. It is generally used as a replacement for RPA, test automation, and web scraping.

Clicknium supplies an automation library and development tool, and it can improve developer efficiency and automatically generate locators for elements on any UI (web, desktop application, etc.). The auto-generated locator is a good choice for many general cases. However, based on some of the scenarios described above, the attributes used for positioning may be dynamic, which requires users to modify the locator. The Clicknium development tools provide multiple functions to help developers easily pick which attributes are used to locate UI elements and to make the final locator more stable.

As the list is dynamically loaded, I use an iterate index to search each item, as clicknium can automatically scroll the item into view, it will trigger to load new items, so I don't need to take care of the dynamic loading.

More detial please check the doc

Clicknium provides the automation technology in a variety of scenarios with different forms, such as SAP automation, Java automation, Windows desktop automation and image automation. I would like to share the automation technology in Clicknium.

Clicknium is a GUI automation Python module. It allows operating Web browser and Windows applications. Github: https://github.com/clicknium/clicknium-docs VS Code extension：https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ClickCorp.clicknium

Playwright, an end-to-end test runner;

We start with a project that was bootstrapped with npx create-next-app. For the E2E test we use Playwright and set it up as described in the testing guide provided by Next.js.

Playwright is a powerful tool developed by Microsoft, it allows developers to write reliable end-to-end tests and perform browser automation tasks with ease. What sets Playwright apart is its ability to work seamlessly across multiple browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and WebKit), it provides a consistent and efficient way to interact with web pages, extract data, and automate repetitive tasks. Moreover, it supports various programming languages such as Node.js, Python, Java, and .NET, that’s making it a versatile choice for web scraping projects. Whether you're scraping public data for analysis, building a web crawler, or automating manual workflows, Playwright has you covered.

The consensus I could gather is either use playwright or use a workaround to solve it in the puppeteer layer. The root cause of the bug is a websocket size limitation on the CDP protocol for chromium.

With the advent of tools like Puppeteer and now Playwright, end-to-end testing has become much easier and more reliable. For anyone who's used Selenium in the past, you know what I'm talking about. Puppeteer has opened the way in terms of E2E tooling, but Playwright has taken it to the next level and made it easier to await for certain selectors or conditions to be fulfilled (via locators), thus making tests more reliable and less flaky. Also, it's a game changer that it introduced a test-runner - this made the integration between the headless browser and the actual test code much smoother.

In this tutorial, our main focus will be on Playwright web scraping. So what is Playwright? It’s a handy framework created by Microsoft. It's known for making web interactions more streamlined and works reliably with all the latest browsers like WebKit, Chromium, and Firefox. You can also run tests in headless or headed mode and emulate native mobile environments like Google Chrome for Android and Mobile Safari.

// playwright.config.ts import { defineConfig } from "@playwright/test"; /** * See https://playwright.dev/docs/test-configuration. */ export default defineConfig({ testDir: "./src/pages", reporter: "list", use: { baseURL: "http://localhost:5432/", }, timeout: process.env.CI ? 10000 : 4000, // ... more options });

Issues with Playwright

Fast and reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps | Playwright

This means you cannot place test files outside of this directory, which was brought up as a question on Github some time ago. Initially, I thought it would be nice to add another folder in the repo called "scripts", but Playwright does not allow multiple testDir values.