Round and Round with the For..Next in Katalon Studio
Another big improvement with Katalon Studio is the looping mechanisms. The Selenium IDE could use loops with the addition of the SelBlocks plugin, but Katalon and Groovy support that natively and I use it frequently to read values from a table.
From the old BASIC days, the FOR loop is:
For A=1 to 5 (Step 1) Print("hello world") Next A
We have quite a few shortcuts and it now looks like this:
for (loop = 1; loop <=5; loop++) {
println("hello world")
}
To get started, Katalon offers a way to set up a FOR loop in Manual view. If you click the down arrow next to Add, there is an option for Looping Statements and within there, For Loop Statement.
Choosing this option, creates a FOR loop that looks like:
for (def index : (0..0)) { }
While either format is acceptable, I actually prefer:
for (loop = 1; loop <=5; loop++)
For my inexperienced mind, it’s a little easier to understand at a glance. It’s also the way SelBlocks did it, so it looks more natural to me.
Following that example, here is a loop that counts from 1 to 10 in order to read the 10 categories listed on a page. For each row it reads the Category name, the YTD Sales value and the YTD Plan value. Since there are always 10 categories, the boundary of loop is set at a specific number.
//Read the Product Category, the YTD Sales, YTD Plan from the table
for (loop = 1; loop <=10; loop++) {
planCategory=WebUI.getText(findTestObject('Page_/Customer Search/Customer 2018 Plan Tab/Plan Tab Category', [('Variable') : loop]))
planYTDSales=WebUI.getText(findTestObject('Page_/Customer Search/Customer 2018 Plan Tab/Plan Tab YTD Sales', [('Variable') : loop]))
planYTDPlan=WebUI.getText(findTestObject('Page_/Customer Search/Customer 2018 Plan Tab/Plan Tab YTD Plan', [('Variable') : loop]))
log.logWarning('Category: ' + planCategory + ' -:- ' + 'YTD Sales: ' + planYTDSales + ' -:- ' + 'YTD Plan: ' + planYTDPlan)
}
The FOR loop can also be set to a variable, something determined based on information read from the site.
The code below is an example of the FOR loop being used to read values off the Sales Dashboard and sum them up. The loop uses a secondary counter (monthOfYear.toInteger() – 1) to determine how many iterations are needed. It then reads the Plan Value by passing in the value of loop to the Variable configured as part of the object. In this case, the variable represents the row we are reading.
As part of the loop, the $ and , are removed from the figure, so the values can be summed. This total is then checked against the total read from the site to make sure the calculation is correct.
Since the values being read are of type String the Integer.valueOf command is used to turn the values into Integers so they can be summed correctly.
for (loop = 1; loop <= (monthOfYear.toInteger() - 1); loop++) { tempText = WebUI.getText(findTestObject('Page_/Sales Dashboard/YTD Gross Profit Plan Value - By Month tab', [('Variable') : loop])) grossProfitMonth = tempText.replaceAll('[$,]', '') grossProfitPlanTotal = (Integer.valueOf(grossProfitPlanTotal) + Integer.valueOf(grossProfitMonth)) }
There are plenty of other uses for the FOR loop, but the basic structure is the same. For my cases, the loop is used to read a series of values from a table. Depending on where I place my Variable definition within the Objects XPATH definition, that can be reading down a column or reading across rows. It’s a simple command, but it provides a lot of power.