Introduction to Validating Web Applications

Introduction

ACTF Webelo supports the validation of web content within an embedded Mozilla DOM Browser widget. Web content can be broadly divided into two categories for ACTF's purposes:

  1. static web content is content that is loaded by the browser and assembled into a Document Object Model (DOM). This model remains unchanged regardless of user interactions with the web page until a new page is loaded either by browsing to a new page or by clicking a link.
  2. dynamic web content is content that is loaded by the browser and assembled into a Document Object Model (DOM). This model may be altered as the user interacts with or manipulates components on the page. Nodes may be inserted, deleted, or have one or more of their attributes changed as the result of a user's actions. Such content is often referred to as dynamic HTML or DHTML.

Previously, ACTF's validation was primarily restricted to static web content, although some dynamic content could be validated. In particular, actions that lead to the insertion of a new node into the DOM or that change the visibility property of a node's style attribute will result in a validation process being invoked. Webelo 0.2.0 introduces the ability to validate dynamic content. Future work will include a way for users to specify exactly which events or actions should result in a validation being performed.

Be sure to perform the required installation of XULRunner described below first. Then choose the appropriate task for your situation from the list below:

Important - Required setup - XUL Runner

XUL Runner is a Mozilla runtime that must be present and instantiated in order to use the Mozilla DOM Browser widget packaged with ACTF. No matter which type of validation you wish to perform, you will need to install XULRunner first.

You can download XULRunner 1.9.0.3 from the Mozilla Developer Network. Follow the instructions on that page to install it on your system. Once you unzip the XULRunner archive and register XULRunner with Windows, you need not perform any other steps. The Mozilla DOM Browser widget packaged with ACTF will automatically find and activate the XULRunner runtime environment.

Note: The Mozilla Browser widget used by ACTF is part of the Eclipse AJAX Tooling Framework (ATF) project. You will need to use XULRunner v1.9 and the matching xpcom that ACTF installs in order to perform validations of HTML content. Other levels of ATF or Mozilla xpcom are not supported.