Open UI Automation

About Open UI Automation

Open UI Automation (OUIA) is a specification of certain key guidelines to follow when creating a new web framework or application. The goal is to ease the burden of creating and maintaining automated testing environments. OUIA standardizes some HTML attributes and web page behavior. It helps to create trivial and unambiguous locators of the elements in the DOM for various automated test suites.

Why not use `id` or `ARIA`?

ARIA is designed as an accessibility specification, and it doesn't account for aspects that are crucial for automation such as a component type. The id attribute might be reserved by some front-end code, and there might be restrictions on changing it. Having a separate id attribute makes it application and framework independent. Developers and testers have a contract that these attributes are designed for UI automation.

Specification parts

The following blocks exist in the specification:

OUIA:Component - components and component frameworks
OUIA:Page - page identification
OUIA:PageSafe - interaction safety

You can find the complete description on the OUIA website.

Usage

PatternFly 4 generates a data-ouia-component-type attribute for selected components automatically based on the name. For example, the data-ouia-component-type attribute for the button component is PF4/Button. The id of the data-ouia-component-id attribute is random by default. To specify the concrete id, add an ouiaId prop to the component.