automating fennec bookmark manager

This is more of a technical note and probably a boring read for anybody not interested in test development for fennec.

In an effort to add real automation for Fennec we have had issues making progress using browser-chrome to develop tests. Our latest bits of work come from bookmarks where happyhans is adding additional tests to what zad started (let me note that zad really paved the way for these tests on Fennec).

One thing we were trying to figure out is how to click on the edit button while managing bookmarks. It would be nice if we could just reuse test code from Firefox, but that is not an option. So using DOM Inspector and a lot of other help on IRC, browsing source code and just hacking, I have found the method to click a bookmark.

    chromeWindow.BrowserUI.showBookmarks();
    chromeWindow.BookmarkList.toggleManage();

    var bookkmarkitems = chromeWindow.document.getElementById("bookmark-items");
    var bookmarkitem = window.document.getAnonymousElementByAttribute(bookmarkitems, "class", "bookmark-item");
    var editButton = window.document.getAnonymousElementByAttribute(bookmarkitem, "anonid", "edit-button");
    editButton.click();

A lot of this code :happyhans did. I found out the last two lines where we have a list of bookmarks and just need to find the “Edit” button to click.

What we see here is getting a list of bookmarkitems with getElementById limits our scope and returns a XULElement. Inside this Element, we have a list of “bookmark-item” classes which contain the bookmarks and the buttons to interact with them.

Since there is no ID on the bookmark-item, I query it with the getAnonymousElementByAttribute but here I start with my bookmark-items and look for a class named “bookmark-item”. This sound straightforward, but finding examples of other code to do this is not really possible.

Lastly, I took the bookmark-item (which defaults to the first item) and search for the “edit-button” as it has a “anonid”. I found out all of this information using the DOM Inspector (once mfinkle helped me use it properly).

So that is the basics. This code needs some real love to make it work with a specific title or URI instead of defaulting to the first item in the list. Knowing what I do now gives me some confidence in being able to figure out how to solve other problems in the bookmark manager.