Approach for Automating localized Web application in Selenium using Java Bindings

I am automating test cases for a web application using selenium 2.0 and Java. My application supports multiple languages. Some of the test cases require me to validate the text that appears in the UI like success/error messages etc.I am using a properties file to store whatever text I am referring in my tests from the UI, currently only english. For example there is locale_english.properties(see below) that contains all references in english. I am going to have multiple properties files like this for different locales like locale_chinese.properties,locale_french.properties and so on. For locales other than english, their corresponding properties file would have UTF-8 characters (e.g \u30ed) representing the native characters(see below). So If I want to test say Chinese UI, I would load "locale_chinese.properties" instead of "locale_english.properties". I am going to convert the native characters for non-english locale using perhaps native2ascii from JDK or some other way.I tested that Selenium API works well with UTF-8 characters for non-english locales

---locale_englis开发者_JAVA百科h.properties------
user.login.error= Please verify username/password

---locale_chinese.properties------
user.login.error= \u30ed\u30ef\u30eg\u30eh\u30ed

and so on.

The problem is that my locale_english.properties is growing and going out of control. It is becoming hard to manage a single properties file for one locale let alone for multiple locales. Is there a better way of handling localization in Java, particularly in situations like I am in?

Thanks!

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You're right that there is a problem managing the files, but you're also right that this is the best approach. Some things are just hard :-(

Selenium (at least the Selenium RC API) does indeed support Unicode input and output, we have lots of tests that enter and confirm Cyrillic and Simple Chinese characters from C#. Since Java strings are Unicode at the core (just like C#), I expect you could simply create the file in a UTF-8-friendly editor like Notepad++ and read them straight into strings and use them directly in the Selenium API.

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This is how I solved the issue for those who are interested.

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a database would work better for many reasons, like growth, central location, kept outside of app and can be edited and maintained outside of app. We used a table with columns:

id (int) auto increment id_text -- this and other columns are varchar ... except for date time for last 2 lang translation created_by updated_by created_date updated_date

An id is a short english description of the text - like 'hello' or 'error1msg', the key in your map.

In java had a function to get the text for a particular text ... and a app level property - default language (usually en but good to keep it configurable)

Function would scan already loaded hashmap for language asked for - say "ch"

If corresponding translation was not found for this language we would return the default language translation and if that was not founf then we would return "[" + id "]" so the tester knows something is missing in data base - can go to web screen to edit translation table and add it.