Window's InputSimulator Radio Button Check

Just another day another learning experience. I was asked by my employer to write a selenium script to import about 2000 data entries into a web portal. This was the first selenium script I have wrote and with help from a colleague that works with selenium daily I was able to accomplish this task.

First the Dependencies:

WindowsInput
Selenium


WindowsInput is a dll you can paste and reference in your bin a short google search should yield results for this  so I won't go to any detail unless someone requests it then I'll do a follow up post. Selenium and be installed via the Nuget Manager within Visual Studio which is a blessing from heaven no more searching around the web for what you need.

So here is my little method which is more just to display some of the options that I used to write my script. The comments are self explanatory this is a very basic implementation. You will notice the ability to navigate to a url. My experience included adding logic for basic auth before I was able to put any input in the forms.

So what I wanted to throw out here in this blog post was the simple fact that I hunted around the web for  about 40 min trying to find how to check that lame radio button on the import form. I could get the focus on the radio button but I was unaware that there was any keyboard stroke that could fill that puppy in. Where the limitations are that I could not use the mouse buttons I had to find and alternate way of doing this. I finally ran across this page from Mozilla which is awesome because I'm writing this script in Firefox there are ways of using other browsers as well. 

Mozilla Forum


So there I learned that you could turn a radio button on or off by selected the spacebar. So as you can see in my code the last simulation is the space which selects the radio button, the rest of my data fills and the submit button selected and all is right in the world. I just thought I could maybe save someone else the same 40 minutes our time is precious. Also maybe this is just common knowledge let me know if I'm super lame and I was living in ignorance. Thanks. Remember to code like Vikings.

Report Viewer Control IE11

With the latest release of IE11 there have been some cool upgrades I would say in style of the dev tools (it would be cool if they did not time out on me) but there are some compatibility issues that I have ran into with a ReportViewer control on my web application. Each time I would try to render a .rdl file document via the controller the loading .gif would kick on and the report would time out on me. It appears I was not the only one.

Web Forms project

Server: IIS7 

Framework: 3.5

Microsoft Report Viewer 10.0.0.0

Visual Studio 2012

So searching around the web I found the usual suspects the first thing everyone was shouting on stack overflow was changing the rendering of IE to IE10 mode via meta tags in the head of the document. I'm not really a fan of this approach it's more of a band-aid solution then a fix. 

Then I tried using the dev tools on IE11 to see if I could narrow down the network traffic and see which requests were timing out and received no joy there. 

Finally I found the clue I was looking for to break this issue. I ran the request again while logged into the web server and checking the Event Viewer log. There I saw my failed attempt to pull the document. The event viewer logs read "HttpHandlerInputException, Missing URL parameter: IterationId."

After some searching I found that you could fix this missing parameter by adding some logic to your gobal.aspx file on your project as follows: 

It basically checks your request and if it is coming from your report viewer url performs another check to make sure that the parameter has a value and if not places the default zero value which will suffice the request and you will get your document. Experimenting with this issue I only found it in IE11 with the rest of the browser the rendering without this parameter was not an issue. It seems that IE is a little more picky on what it will allow to come through the system. I've found this with the rendering of CSS and html as well. I hope this post helps someone out there save some time. This was a 2 day easter egg hunt for myself. Always looking to pass this information along to my fellow coders. Also I've using this blog to document my fixes so later on when I run into this again I'll know where to start.