Automatic web form testing/filling specially on IE 6

Question

I recently became lead on getting an inordinate amount of testing done in a very short period of time. We have many different web forms, using custom (Telerik) controls that need to be tested for proper data validation and sensible handling of the data. Some of the forms are several pages long with 30-80 different controls for data entry. I am looking for a software solution (that is free) that would allow me to automate the process of filling in these forms by designing a script, or using a UI. The other requirement is that I can't use any browsers but IE6 (terrible, I know).

I have previously used AutoHotkey to great success for automatic Windows form testing, since Autohotkey's API allows you to directly reference controls on the Windows form. However Autohotkey does not have similar support for web forms (everything is just one big "InternetExplorer" control).

While I would prefer that I could script some variance in the data to help serialize each test, it's not necessary, as I could go back through and manually edit a field or two (plus "break" whatever control I'm currently testing) to serialize each test.

If you've ever seen Spawner: http://forge.mysql.com/projects/project.php?id=214

It's almost exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for (Spawner generates dummy SQL data, as opposed to dummy webform data) - but I won't be picky, I've got a really short deadline to meet and had this thrust in my lap just today. ;)

Edit1: One of the challenges of just using Autohotkey to simulate keyboard input (tabbing through controls) is that some controls don't currently have tab index (bug), and some controls cause a page reload after modification, resulting in inconsistent control focus (tabbing screwed up). Our application makes heavy use of page reloads to populate fields (select a location, it auto-populates a city, for example).

Answer 1

As pointed out by Ripon Al Wasim below WebDriver is the modern way to do this.

You could try Selenium or maybe more precisely Selenium Remote Control, this would let you record a script and then use Selenium Remote control to play it back in IE.

Answer 2

You might like the Sahi test framework. Even though we have switch to Selenium (mentioned above) as a better tool, I still can recommend Sahi for testing automation. We still have some test written in sahi and running under Cruise Control.

The website is http://sahi.co.in/w/

Answer 3

my choice would be watin as long as you have ie6 installed on your test machine then just automate it. it will happily wait until the desired element is present before continuing.