Adding some functionality to the FitNesse frontend

I love Slim scenarios in FitNesse. I use them to build my own domain specific language when specifying with examples, and of course I call scenarios from scenarios. Sometimes they are pretty deeply nested and it is a pain to manually expand the red scenarios recursively to see the actual failure.

So I started with a very simple approach to expand all failed scenarios and added a Greasemonkey script to be executed on my test pages. It basically consisted of the following line of javascript code:

jQuery('td.fail>div.collapse_rim>div.hidden').each(function() {toggleCollapsable(this.id)});

Then I started adding this functionality to FitNesse and ended up with a pure javascript and css solution that changes the page while it is loading.

The only change that I had to make in the Java code was in the HtmlPage to load jQuery and my script. I was astonished that none of the velocity templates seem to be used any more, but they are still in the repository. There also seems to be some dead code in there and duplicate code for producing some parts of the html. But I could not easily find out which of these parts were still in use and necessary. So I decided to be a bad boy scout, but make up for it by leaving some useful and clean stuff on the camp ground.

I made a new section that is always visible in the top right corner of the browser window as soon as any collapsable content appears on the page. The Expand Failed Scenarios link only appears as soon as there are failed scenarios on the page. The script also removes all the Expand All | Collapse All links from the headers of collapsable sections, since they are not necessary.

New look of the controls with the Expand Failed Scenarios link and having the Expand / Collapse All links removed from the headers of the collabsable sections.

Old look of the Expand All | Collapse All links in every header of a collabsable section.

If you like to see this included in FitNesse, leave a comment or answer to my mail on the fitnesse mailing list.