Coded UI Test script to get all controls on a web page

This is something I wish i’d had a while ago.

I found this blog post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mathew_aniyan/archive/2011/03/31/howto-add-all-controls-on-a-page-to-the-ui-map.aspx

Here’s the info from the page so I have a backup copy in case that blog post above ever gets deleted

HowTo: Add all controls on a page to the UI Map

One of the most frequent asks in Coded UI Test Forums is the ability to add all controls on a page to the UI Map. This can be done with the following code snippet. Here I am adding all controls on the bing start page to the specified ui test file.

[TestMethod]
public void CodedUITestMethod1()
{
    string uiTestFileName = @"D:\dev11\ConsoleApplication1\TestProject1\UIMap.uitest";
    UITest uiTest = UITest.Create(uiTestFileName);
    Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UITest.Common.UIMap.UIMap newMap = new Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UITest.Common.UIMap.UIMap(); 
    newMap.Id = "UIMap"; 
    uiTest.Maps.Add(newMap);
    GetAllChildren(BrowserWindow.Launch(new Uri("http://bing.com")), uiTest.Maps[0]);
             uiTest.Save(uiTestFileName);
}

private void GetAllChildren(UITestControl uiTestControl, Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UITest.Common.UIMap.UIMap map)
        {
         foreach (UITestControl child in uiTestControl.GetChildren())
            {
                map.AddUIObject((IUITechnologyElement)child.GetProperty(UITestControl.PropertyNames.UITechnologyElement));
                GetAllChildren(child, map);
            }
        }
 

Let us look at what the code snippet does.

This line of code creates a UITest object from a file. Here I am assuming that we have an empty UITest file. You can add an empty UI Test file to your Test Project by right clicking on the Test Project and choosing Add –> New Item –> Coded UI Test Map.

UITest uiTest = UITest.Create(uiTestFileName);

These next 3 lines create a new UIMap object and adds it to UITest object

Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UITest.Common.UIMap.UIMap newMap = new Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UITest.Common.UIMap.UIMap();
newMap.Id = "UIMap";
uiTest.Maps.Add(newMap);

The next line launches the browser, navigates to bing.com and passes a reference to the browser & the UIMap object to GetAllChildren method.  GetAllChildren recursively gets the children of the browser object and adds them to the UIMap.

GetAllChildren(BrowserWindow.Launch(new Uri("http://bing.com")), uiTest.Maps[0];);

In the interests of brevity and ease of description, I have not handled error & exception conditions.  You can now customize the code based on your need. Instead of GetChildren, you can use FindMatchingControls to add all controls of a specific type.

 

Hopefully this will help others out there.

Be warned though, it can take a fair bit of time to gather all the controls on the page. So using FindMatchingControls might help as you really don’t need it to gather every single control on a page.