Allow rich configuration of Selenium tests

[Dominik George]

Currently, the SeleniumTestCase allows passing a list of browsers to run tests with.

I propose to extend this feature from a flat list of strings to the following:

A dictionary mapping browsers to a list of dictionaries can be passed. The key is the name of the browser (the same string that was currently passed in the browsers list), and the list contains dictionaries of capabilities that are passed to the respective browsers.

The use case is testing with the same browser with different settings. e.g. different screen resolutions, different versions (possible with BrowserStack), etc.

I am willing to implement this change if the idea is accepted.

[Tim Graham]

Can you think of a suitable alternative to passing complex data structures on the command line? That seems a little verbose and tricky with issues like character escaping. Something like --selenium={\"foo\":[{\"bar\":\"baz\"}]} doesn't look so nice to me. Maybe reading configurations from a file?

[Dominik George]

I did not think of passing such configuration on the command-line.

Reading from a file would be an optoin, of course. Or hard-coded in the test suite.

[Carlton Gibson]

Hi Dominik.

I'm going to say wontfix here initially. That doesn't mean definitely not, just that it seems out of scope for what we'd include in Django itself.

If you want to pull together a proof-of-concept, it's something we could look at. (And happily so!) (So I'm tempted towards needsinfo again for that reason.)

Maybe what you're suggesting would be a trivial pass-through to selenium, but a quick initial look browser capabilities there presents a wall of posts and docs that aren't exactly inviting, so it's hard to assess.

(New features like this often need some idea of what's really involved, and we often begin with discussion on the DevelopersMailingList, which has a larger audience, rather than straight here on Trac, which is better for concrete addressable with a plan.)

I hope that makes sense.