Sikuli on Selenium- A demonstration of automation using selenium and Sikuli (such as flash uploader)

Selenium 2.0 is just launched, and the excitement remind me that there are tons of selenium related things I need to share with the world.

One of those things is File Upload. File uploads have always been a real pain to automate using selenium.

People have used AutoIt (so have I) to upload on windows only environment. On windows, beside AutoIt, native events  (of webdriver) have worked a great deal for me in the past. 

It becomes a real challenge  when file upload is done via some flash components (components which don't provides hooks from java script to play with files to upload).  

I had tired couple of things but the thing which worked really well was to have type="file"  and send keys but flash uploader and *nix remains challenging.  

Then I stumble across Sikuli. From there web site "Sikuli is a visual technology to automate and test graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots)".

Below is what I have done to use it to automat file upload via flash components on MacOS X. With few image changes we should be able to port it for Linux.

Source code is available at: https://github.com/mubbashir/Sikuli-on-Selenium

See it pretty smoothly uploads the file, but .. It works like a real user and real human user i.e. a real user can only interact with what is being displayed on the Screen. If the browser window dosen't have the focus Sikuli will not be able to find images.

Did I mention that test are written using TestNG, so this can slightly work as demonstration of TestNG on Selenium as well. 

Note: I haven't tried this in head-less mode.