Mendix - Part 2 - Diving deeper (E2E automation testing of Mendix using Playwright)

Mendix Series

1.  Overview of Mendix 

2. Mendix - Part 2 - Diving deeper (this post)

3. Extensibility for Mendix Studio 

4. Building a Mendix Widget for the Mendix Market Place (Convert text to Audio using Azure AI)

5. Mendix Tips & Thoughts

6. Competitors

AI with Mendix (current version Mendix 10.5.x):

1. Logic bot - recommends what you are likely to do, like a copilot as you go along building the app
2. Performance bot - shows redundancies, recommends performance improvements 
3. Chatbot in beta

Playwright is a good UI testing tool for Mendix:

For more advanced applications, Playwright is a good testing framework that can help developers know their code is running end-to-end, useful for monitoring applications and behaviour, and also can be used as part of the CI process to validate Mendix end user accessibility as shown in this mp4 (7 minutes - good video).

mp4 walking thru testing a Mendix site, including WCAG accessibility

WCAG accessibility testing in Playwright starts at min 5:25. Build in WCAG testing to your playwright tests> npm install @axe-core/playwright

Thoughts:

• Deployment can take time when the project grows.
• Domain modelling: can use existing models and add to Mendix.
• Playwright is perfect for Mendix testing, here is a basic dev example.
• The Mendix Community is a good place to post questions.

Mendix Tip: I needed to change from US format to UK date time format:

The community has the answer: Mendix Forum - Question Details

Mendix Series

1.  Overview of Mendix 

2. Mendix - Part 2 - Diving deeper (this post)

3. Extensibility for Mendix Studio 

4. Building a Mendix Widget for the Mendix marketplace (Convert text to Audio using Azure AI)

5. Mendix Tips & Thoughts

6. Competitors

Playwright Series

1. Playwright Post 1 - Overview of E2E testing using Playwright 

2. Playwright Post 2 - Continuously Test/Monitor Canvas apps and website with MFA enabled 

3. Playwright Post 3 - Add App Insights logging inside your Playwright tests 

4. Playwright Series - Post 4 - 6 Min walkthru of Playwright testing with Azure Monitor

5. Playwright Post 5 - Understanding how playwright works

App Insights - Website and API Monitoring

Overview:  App Insights has functionality to run scheduled web requests and log the output in App Insights.  There are multiple advantages to this including end to end active monitoring of web sites and API's, and keeping the application warm.

Below I show a simple request to my blog (public website) and the results, Azure refers to this test type as a URL Ping test which is basically a URL HTTP GET request.  

Wait a few minutes and Refresh to see the results:

Very easy way to include a constant check that your API or Website is running.  There is also the options to create "Multi-step web test" using Visual Studio.  You can record the authentication and assert for known response content to build advanced constant monitoring.

Tip: The URL does need to be publicly available.

The content I used to test out the functionality comes from the Microsoft Docs site.

Also see Live Metric Stream that is part of App Insights.

Monitoring using Azure Monitor Dashboards:

• The image above shows a dashboard that can be used to monitor a SaaS applications PaaS Infrastructure.
• It's a good idea to create multiple dashboards and they can show the overview and allow the user to drill into specific areas.
• Internal boards watching key API's, HTTP uptime ping type requests is also a good idea.

Updated: 11 Jan 2023 - Checkly looks like a great monitoring service that works with Playwright for continuous monitoring.  I like to keep all my SaaS on Azure, but Checkly is independent an as it is monitoring.

More Info: 

App Insights MultiStep Tests  Replacement Option for MultiStep Test based on Azure Functions