Internet Explorer automation/Watin: catching navigation error codes

July 08, 2008

...

One question have troubled me for some time when automating Internet Explorer (actually, I am doing web testing with Watin): how to test for HTTP status codes. Finally, I figured out how to do this. The lies in an event that the InternetExplorer object raises when navigation is unsuccessful.

I ended up with writing a C# helper class:

using System.Net;
using WatiN.Core;
using SHDocVw;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
using System.Globalization;
namespace Test
{
    public class NavigationObserver
    {
        private HttpStatusCode _statusCode;
        public NavigationObserver(IE ie)
        {
            InternetExplorer internetExplorer = (InternetExplorer)ie.InternetExplorer;
            internetExplorer.NavigateError += new DWebBrowserEvents2_NavigateErrorEventHandler(IeNavigateError);
        }
        public void ShouldHave(HttpStatusCode expectedStatusCode)
        {
            if (!_statusCode.Equals(expectedStatusCode))
            {
                Assert.Fail(string.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, "Wrong status code. Expected {0}, but was {1}",
                    expectedStatusCode, _statusCode));
            }
        }
        private void IeNavigateError(object pDisp, ref object URL, ref object Frame, ref object StatusCode, ref bool Cancel)
        {
            _statusCode = (HttpStatusCode)StatusCode;
        }
    }
}

Note that I use Visual Studio test runner to run my web tests. Then, I can use this in my test:

using (IE ie = new IE())
{
    NavigationObserver observer = new NavigationObserver(ie);
    ie.GoTo("http://some.where.com");
    observer.ShouldHave(HttpStatusCode.NotFound);
}