Conditional reading from excel data in Selenium JAVA

Question

Data set and demo webUI - Sample data in excel sheet (first row being column header) -

Demo layout -

Problem scenario - The data to be filled up is from an excel sheet, if the occupation is Entered (that is typed in), it will search in excel sheet's occupation column and populate the data in the name field, for example - After typing engineer, the names of engineers have been populated in the drop-down.

After the name is selected (manually), the Address will be automatically put in the address box from the excel sheets data. i.e. conditional checking from excel sheets data.

Now I can read from excel sheet using the jxl library, but I do not know how to implement the conditional checks from the excel data.

Any guideline / code snippet for implementing the conditional checks is highly appreciated.

Answer 1

I'm not too sure what your issue is, really, but I'll give it a go.

From your explanation, the engineer names in your Excel are used to create option elements in the DOM?

Issue 1: this feels like something your application should fetch from its database.

Issue 2: you then mention that you manually select a value in the dropdown.

Thoughts: a data row (as input for your tests) should only contain input values (such as a user would type or select) and maybe expected values to check against (again, what a human user could do).

An end user will not create dropdown options in the DOM - why do so in your automated scenario?

Solution: can the dropdown data be provided from the application's database? The values in the Excel then only indicate what to select and validate, as befits a data-driven automated test (each row is passed into a test; spreading data for one test over 3 rows is asking for trouble).

If not, then add a column to your Excel containing "John;Emma;Norman" for each Engineer line. When passing the first row to your test, split this column in a list to create the dropdown, then use column first_name to select what you want.