How To Automate Calendar In Selenium WebDriver Testing

Nowadays, very frequently while purchasing a movie ticket online or filling a form, you’d encounter calendars to select dates and times. These calendars make the entire procedure of picking dates much easier and interactive and play a significant role in improving user experience. 

It would be incredible to discover websites, particularly in the travel and hospitality domain, where they don’t make usage of the date picker calendar so that their consumers can plan their travel. 

Since there are various types of calendar controls and their behavior can differ across several web browsers, it becomes crucial to comprehensively automate calendar or date picker in Selenium WebDriver. 

The most prominent date picker controls are calendar using jQuery and Kendo calendar (or Kendo date picker). Even if you have not utilized calendar controls for your project, it is crucial to have know-how about these basic controls and mechanisms to automate calendar using Selenium WebDriver. 

We will take a deep dive into how to handle calendar in selenium, how to create a dynamic calendar in HTML, and calendar using JQuery. Below are the types of calendar controls. 

Types of Calendar Controls

A calendar control enables the user to choose a date easily. Usually, it occurs as an input field in an HTML form. Before the date chosen by the user probably will be required later, it is essential to maintain the format. 

This is also why HTML forms are further widely utilized than entering dates in a text-box. There are two prominent types of calendar controls you’d desire to automate calendar using Selenium WebDriver.

1. JQuery Calendar 

The jQuery calendar is a portion of the open-source project at JS Foundation earlier hailed as jQuery Foundation. There are several other components like user interface interactions, effects, widgets, etc. that are also created on top of jQuery JavaScript Library.

2. Kendo Calendar

Kendo Calendar is formulated by Telerik.com and it is not an open-source project. Utilizing Kendo UI, developers can create JavaScript apps faster. Kendo and jQuery Calendars function on all primary web browsers. 

However, there are some exceptions like Kendo on IE functions on IE7 (and above) whereas jQuery functions on IE8 (and above). Both these controls are responsive and possess mobile browser compatibility. 

How to Handle Calendar in Selenium?

The challenge in Selenium test automation of calendar controls is that the demonstration of data can differ from calendar to calendar. In some calendar controls, the months and years are illustrated in a drop-down on the other hand, in a few of them, the months and years can be altered using navigation controls i.e. earlier and next buttons.

Several date picker controls also possess time alongside date and time. This gives rise to automated browser testing of calendar controls contesting as the test execution will require to be tweaked as per the impression and style of the control. Here we will focus on the performance to automate calendar using Selenium WebDriver:

How to Handle ‘JQuery Calendar’ in an iFRAME

There are various scenarios where you would wish to place the Calendar control inside an Frame. In such scenarios before executing any operation on the date picker, you have to first shift to that iFrame. Once inside the iFrame, you should conduct the following operations:

Step 1:  Click on the Calendar Control to open the same.

Step 2:  Find the Year drop-down control and choose the required year from that drop-down.

Step 3:  Find the Month drop-down control and choose the required month from that drop-down.

Step 4:  Once year and month are selected, locate the related date by navigating through the Date table.

Browser Compatibility Problems With Calendars

As your users enter your web application utilizing various browsers, OS, and devices, a lot of device or browser compatibility problems are bound to arrive. This is mainly because every browser possesses its browser engine and it probably does not support some components.

The crucial focus of test automation to automate calendar using Selenium WebDriver is assuring constant user-experience across diverse combinations used to access your web page/web app. 

Five new input types were added in HTML 5 utilizing which web developers can add calendar controls to their website consuming native HTML. There is no dependence on any JavaScript or jQuery library. 

The only downside is different experiences over several as each one has its mechanism to provide the Calendar (date time picker) control to automate calendar using Selenium WebDriver. Calendar control input type does not possess decent cross-browser support. 

Date and Time input types are not supported on any edition of Internet Explorer (IE). There are problems with Calendar controls on Safari 3.1, Safari 12.1, as well as Safari 13. The same is further applicable for a limited edition of the Firefox browser.

A responsible way to deal cross-browser compatible problems with input types like Calendar controls is by making the practice of the jQuery Calendar. It delivers uniformity in the widget interface across all the browsers and even functions with unsupported browsers like IE and Safari. 

Conclusion

To conclude, in this how to handle calendar in selenium tutorial, we had a look at the most outstanding Calendar controls and how to accomplish Selenium test automation on these Calendar controls. Input types such as date-time pickers, color pickers, etc. are increasingly being utilized in web development.

There is no thumb law to automate calendars using Selenium WebDriver as there are various kinds of Calendar Controls and their behavior probably differs from one browser to another. This is where Selenium test automation on the cloud can be instrumental as it allows you to assess the test code on several combinations of browsers, devices, and operating systems.

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