How to run script when selenium node is idle (Selenium grid) - selenium-webdriver

Is there any way to trigger a .bat script when a selenium node is idle?
I have a selenium grid setup consisting of one hub and three nodes on separate machines. What i'm trying to do is to have a script that cleans up the testing environment on each node after a test suite has been executed. As there might be other test suites starting directly after another, I somehow need to trigger the script when the node has been idle for a few seconds.
The script itself is relatively fast, takes about 1-2seconds to run. How can I trigger this at an appropriate time?

The short answer is, you cannot do this from outside of the grid (atleast its not that straight forward). The reason why I say this is because, at any given point in time you can very easily find out the current usage statistics, but just before you trigger some cleanup actions, the grid may end up routing a new test to the node which is being cleaned up and thus causing invalid test failures.
Sometime back I created a blog post which talks about how to go about building a Self Healing Grid (which is what you are after). The details are specified in an elaborate manner here
If you are interested in consuming something thats already built and don't want to spend time re-inventing the wheel, you can take a look at the following Open source implementations implementations:
SeLion's Enhanced Grid built by PayPal (I was involved in building this).
Selenium Grid Extras built by GroupOn.

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Selenium Webdriver + Jmeter + StormRunner for Performance test

I wanted to try out integration of Selenium Jmeter and StormRunner. My end goal is to do Load testing with 'n' number of users on StormRunner
What ? - For e.g. I have Selenium Script, convert it in to Jmeter (I can get this information from many sources)
Then my Jmeter script should get ready
Then upload Jmeter script in to StormRunner and pass the necessary parameter through Jenkins and run the load test.
I really want the opinion here about feasibility and whether it is in right direction or not.
Idea here is that Automated Load/Performance test
Selenium is a browser automation framework and JMeter acts on HTTP protocol level so your "Automated" requirement might not be fulfilled especially if your tests are relying on client-side checks like sorting or waiting for element to appear.
Theoretically given you properly configure JMeter it can behave like a real browser, but it still not be executing client-side JavaScript.
If you're fine with this constraint - your approach is valid, if not and the "automated functional test" requirement is the must - consider migrating to TruClient Protocol instead
Why wouldn't you covert your script to a native Loadrunner/Stormrunner form of virtual user?
You should look at the value of what you are trying to achieve. The end value of a performance test is in analysis. Analysis simply takes the timing records and the resource measurements produced during the test, bringing them together on a common timestamp, and then allowing you to analyze what resource "X" is being impinged when timing record "Y" is too long. This then points to some configuration or code which locks up on resource, "X."
What is your path to value in your model? You speak about converting a functional test script to a performance one. Realistically, you should already know that your code, "works for one," before you get to asking, "Does it work for many?" There is a change in script definitions which typically accompanies this understanding.
Where are your collection of resources noted? Which Resources? On which Hosts? This is on the "path to value" problem where you need to have the resource measurements to diagnose root cause of poor performance.

DotTrace no clear big amount of user code execution time

For my work I used DotTrace to analyze slowness one of our cliënts experiences in our WPF desktop application.
I used it before to do this which resulted in the conclusion that the DataBase calls where slow which we could then find a solution for.
This time however, I see 75% of the execution time in Native code and no clear slowness in the user code.
I searched some around and saw a few other people with the same question.
The answer there was either that it's normal (previous snapshot also had just a tiny part of execution time in user code, so that seems okay) or that you can analyze it further if you check the box "Collect native allocations" when making the snapshot (which I unfortunately didn't check).
If I check just the user code most of the execution time resides in DevExpress DLLs which are third party UI components. Could you then say that this is moving towards hardware related slowness (see User code part of the snapshot below)?
I used the Timeline option to create the snapshot.
My questions:
Since the snapshot doesn't show a lot of time in true user code (excluding the DevExpress components), could I then conclude that this slowness isn't caused by inefficiency in our code?
Can I tell anything from the native code part of the snapshot (see screenshot below)?
Is Timeline even handy for this case or are one of the other sampling options clearer?
How would I proceed in such a case to move close to the source of the slowness?
Thanks in advance for your help!
Sebastiaan
Native code part of the snapshot:
The native part is always called by the managed code.
The timeline is not efficient in this case. Here you filtered only the native part.
For this kind of analyzing, i recommand using the Sampling mode where you have a better view of your hot spots. The native part will still be there but you can see which managed code called it.

Quickly access point in UI

We have quite and extensive wizard UI flow and in order to test development changes (e.g.: DOM chanes) at the end of the flow we need to go through all the steps every time since there is data dependancy gathered in previous steps.
This is tedious, takes a lot of time, every time.
Have been thinking about some way of defaulting data but then still we have to click some buttons to get some a-ync data based on the input and press the next btn in the wizard steps.
Using a protractor like behaviour would be excellent. We already have tests set up for that which can take us to the point we need to verify, while developing, in seconds and having all the (stubbed) data in there.
Like to hear your thoughts on this and if such an automated Protractor way of getting to a certain point is possible.
EDIT: why not just use the Protractor test we use on the test server to use locally to go through the development steps and let it stop at a certain point?
While writing the post and re-reading it I answered it in the EDIT with Protractor. Havent tried it yet but should do the trick.

Running UI based selenium smoke tests against an ever-changing UI

We are currently running smoke tests using Selenium Webdriver & JUnit against a B2C product. Since we are using Selenium, the scripts are totally dependent on the UI. Given that the product is out of a tech startup, the UI & workflows keep changing/evolving # an extremely high frequency.
The Consequence: Smoke tests which are supposed to validate the sanctity of the application keeps failing. The team spends more time fixing the scripts rather than validating the build.
I am pretty sure most of the Automation folks out there would have faced similar issues esp. with rapid dev cycles. Looking forward to see some approaches undertaken by others in the industry who have faced similar problems.
Note: The frontend is developed in PHP
Webdriver works roughly like this: there is a start point, webdriver interacts with it (by simulating a button press for example) and then finds the next item to interact with. The next item might be on the next page or the same page. It might be found in various ways, by id or the 3rd div that is class="foo" etc.
The tests are things like does the page load with 200 OK, does the string "login" appear in a particular place and so on
The problem with a changing UI is that all the elements "move about". The ids change and the 3rd div class foo disappears. This means that the webdriver interactions fail and the tests if they are looking for particular elements will fail too
One solution is to develop and test against a set of ids. These ids will refer to fixed UI elements. All searching in webdriver should use the ids. The development team writing the PHP will put the ids in the correct places.
The set of ids can also be used as the basis for a sort of specification and can be used to explain UI flow in different ways to different stake holders.
I do not know of any specific product that handles this process of managing ids in both tests and development code but maintaining a "lexicon" like this to describe the UI items should not be a major task
The more versatile the System under Test is the more important it is to have a framework on top of Selenium that reduces the maintenance effort for a change.
For the most common changes in a System under Test there are several known patterns that can help you to reduce the maintenance efforts:
By using UIMaps to model the UI of the application it is extremely easy to handle changed IDs, CSS classes or similar changes
PageObjects reduce the effort for larger UI changes (e.g. when an input field is changed from a TextBox to a Dropdown field)
Use Keyword Driven Testing to model test cases without any knowledge of the underlying technological representation. i.e. a keyword encapsulates an action from the users point of view – a example for a keyword can be: “loginWithValidUser()”
Don’t just utilize the UI for smoke testing if the UI / Application / Workflows change drastically and very often. Most of the time it is also helpful to test certain functionalities by calling WebServices without any Web-UI

Auto update dialog / Notification for WPF Application

I want a automatic update notification in my application. A message box should appear which tells that an update is available, if user wants then it can download the latest version in downloads folder of windows. Nothing else (user will install it manually) not application.
-I'm using Installshield so no Click once solution.
Thanks
If you want an out-of-the-box solution to this problem you're likely to be disappointed. I haven't found anything that works except ClickOnce, and I dislike it. I did find this:
http://windowsclient.net/articles/appupdater.aspx
My solution was to roll my own. It's actually not that difficult. I wrote a small bootstrapper application that first checks for updates, downloads them if necessary, and then launches my application in a new AppDomain. Pretty easy.
If you want to check for updates while your app is running, you need to write and add a component/class to your project that performs that task, and informs the user (MessageBox or whatever) that an update is available. If they choose to perform the update then you need to launch your bootstrapper (so it can fetch the updates) and kill your current process.
All of this is very possible with a little time and some custom code. It's not as difficult as it sounds. The biggest thing is determining how configurable you want your custom solution to be because that can affect when/where your bootstrapper goes to look for updates (I built mine to look for updates on a network share).
http://autoupdatewpf.codeplex.com/
i found one. This one is quite simple and solve the purpose.

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