Using Sets to fill in Form Details with Katalon Studio

For a test I was recently working on, there were multiple items that could be selected from the main dropdown, with additional fields to populate that can remain the same. Since the initial dropdown only had a couple of entries, I wanted to confirm each one.

My first thought was to create a List, then pass each entry into the dropdown to fill out the form. While that should work fine, I decided on a different route, creating a Set and then using a “For .. Each” style loop to populate the dropdown.

I hadn’t used a Set in a test before, and wanted to give it a try. It also felt like there would be a few less lines of code going this route.

When completed, the code looks like this:

//Create a set for the different values for the Dropdown. Create an entry for each item
Set stringSet = ["Dropdown1", "Dropdown2", "Dropdown3", "Dropdown4", "Dropdown5"]
stringSet.each { item ->
//Select Dropdown entry
WebUI.selectOptionByLabel(findTestObject('Dropdown Form/select-Dropdown Entry'), item, false)
//Detail Description
WebUI.setText(findTestObject('Dropdown Form/textarea-Description'),
    'This is the Detailed Description for ' + item + ' ' + formattedDate + dateHour)
//Completion Date
WebUI.selectOptionByLabel(findTestObject('Dropdown Form/select-Target Completion Month'), 'June', false)
WebUI.selectOptionByLabel(findTestObject('Dropdown Form/select-Target Completion Year'), '2023', false)
//Save
WebUI.click(findTestObject('Dropdown Form/btn-Save'))
}

There is a lot more to Sets than what I’m doing here, but it lends itself quite well to the task. The Set called stringSet is composed of the text entries listed in the dropdown I want to interact with. Since there are 5 items in the set, the loop will execute 5 times.

The text of stringSet is passed using the selectOptionByLabel command. Where you would normally have the text of the label, I have the variable, “item”, which in turn gets resolved to the text of stringSet.

Once this is passed, the other fields are filled in. The first field is a text box, while the next two fields are dropdowns. Selecting a different completion date and year isn’t of much consequence for this test. The main test is to make sure each of the initial dropdown fields can be selected.

It would be just as easy and as valid to create a List, populate it with the same text, get the size of the List, then use a “For” loop to accomplish the same task. I’m not sure which is better or easier to maintain in the long run, but as mentioned, I hadn’t used the Set method and thought I would give it a try.