JavaScript

Nightwatch.js is an end to end testing framework, written in JavaScript. It can be used to test websites and applications and uses the W3C WebDriver API to drive modern browsers to perform the tests.

In this article I will look at setting up Nightwatch.js in a project and getting started with writing tests.

Installing Nightwatch.js

To install Nightwatch.js you should have a npm project. This can be an existing project, but Nightwatch.js can be easily installed as a standalone application; which is useful if you just want to get familiar with the system.

Creating a new, empty, npm project can be done with the following command.

npm init -y

You can now include Nightwatch.js as a development dependency into your project.

npm install nightwatch --save-dev

Adding a progress bar to the top of the page is a simple way of showing the user how far down the page they have read. There is a scroll bar on the right hand side of the page on my current device, but that isn't always present on all devices. It is possible to hide the scroll bar on Macs and mobile devices so that they are only shown as the page is being scrolled.

Putting this piece of information at the top of the page can be a useful indicator that augments already existing technologies.

I was working on a user dashboard recently and decided to add some more signposting to values being updated.  Users were able to select different parameters in order to produce different values, but I thought that the values being updated weren't clear enough.

I had the idea to add some animation to the number as it was updated. This would show the user what items changed as they updated the dashboard. As the dashboard project had jQuery installed this gave me a nice animation system to use.

The HTML of the dashboard was quite simple and contained a number of div elements that contained numbers. Each of the different numbers had a id so that it could be updated independently.

When I first heard the term "Shadow DOM" I had to laugh at the name. I had visions of a cloak and dagger HTML element that would only be seen on the dark web. Or some sort of nefarious shadow site that was the after effect of a hack. In reality, this is quite a useful bit of technology that has a number of applications, although it does need a fairly modern browser to be able to use it. Shadow DOM is part of the web components strategy, which includes custom elements and HTML templates. These give developers the power to create custom tools and experiences that are encapsulated away from other parts of the code.  In this article I will go though what the shadow DOM is, how to use it, and in what situations it comes in handy.

Adding events to HTML elements with jQuery is pretty simple, but I found that extending those events wasn't an easy task. I was faced with an issue where I had some third party code that performed an action on an element, and I needed to add an event and call the same handler from that event. As this was within a CMS I had limited scope to just add my new event to the existing code, so I needed a way of pulling out the current jQuery events and then calling that event handler separately. This post looks at how I accomplished this.

Let's start with a couple of simple form input elements.

<input type="text" class="field-text" />
<input type="text" class="field-next" />

As an example that can be useful here I'm going to set up a 'change' event that will copy the text entered into field-text into the field-next. This is a simple enough example and doesn't require that much code.

After looking at Conway's game of life I have been looking at other forms of cellular automata. This lead me to discover Langton's ant, which is a different kind of cellular automata where an agent (namely an ant) is used to turn the squares on or off as it travels around a grid.

The rules of Langton's ant are quite simple. The ant simply follows two rules as it moves around the grid.

To verify that an element exists in the DOM you just need to use the .length property of a jQuery lookup. If the element is there then the number of elements found will be greater than 0.

if ($('.myelement').length > 0) {
}

This can be shorted by implicitly checking for a positive value of length.

if ($('.myelement').length) {
}

This is useful if you want to check that an element doesn't exist before trying to add it to the DOM. This helps to stop duplicate elements being added, which can create issues.

if ($('.myelement').length == 0) {
}

When I found about the ability to create QR codes using the Google Charts API I decided to sit down and create a little tool that would generate QR codes for me. I've had this tool for a while and I recently noticed that the QR code mechanism has become deprecated. The API will still work for a couple of years so I thought it was worth posting this. Creating a static QR code using Google Charts is quite easy, all you need to do is create an image. For instance, to create a QR code for the #! code address I would do the following.

<img src="https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=177x177&cht=qr&chl=http://www.hashbangcode.com/&choe=UTF-8" />

Which creates the following image.

I have seen a lot of this sort of thing, so though I would put together a quick lesson in JavaScript variable scope. There are some important differences between local and global variables in JavaScript that will cause grey hairs if you don't know what's going on.

Scope is something that dictates what variables can be seen by code. If a variable is created inside a function then it can be said to be local as only the locally running code can see it. A variable that can be accessed by any part of the code is said to be global. This is special in JavaScript, which I will come onto later.

This scope concept is important as if a variable is outside the current scope then the code can't see it. Everything in JavaScript is a variable so understanding how and when variables can be accessed is important.

To create a local variable in JavaScript do this: