One of the new features introduced in selenium 2 was the usage of the page factories to easily instantiate a page object. For those who still use selenium and want to have a feature as the aforementioned one the solution is to use the spring source autowire functionality.
Although spring is a powerful framework for java enterprise development, testers that are usually not familiar with the dependency injection model seem to avoid it. The usage of the spring source Autowire feature can help to instantiate your page objects in an easy and efficient way.
In order to start Autowire you need to declare the instantiated a bean (page object) to src/test/resources/applicationContext-test.xml as follows:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
xmlns:util="http://www.springframework.org/schema/util"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/util http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util-3.0.xsd">
<context:annotation-config />
<context:property-placeholder location="classpath:mcs-config.properties" ignore-resource-not-found="true" system-properties-mode="OVERRIDE" />
<bean id="firstPageObject" class="com.mycompany.FirstPageObject"/>
</beans>
After the bean has been declared just use the Autowire annotation inside the script to instantiate the page object@Autowire FirstPageObject firstPageObjectLikewise for actions resulting to new page objects (click, select) introduce a method returning the resulting page object and Autowire the resulting page object
public FirstPageObject myMethod(){
return firstPageObject;
}
