Defaŭlta lingvo

The name of today’s topic is Esperanto and translates as “default language”.

You may have noticed that some web applications or sites change their language depending on either your browser language setting or on your location.

Problem

In case you have international developers in your team all writing and running some tests on different computer, you also may have noticed that the very same tests is failing or passing because the applications was displayed in different languages on different machines.

If the application decides about the language based on user location, it can be difficult to write stable tests running everywhere. But if it is just “preferred browser language of the user”, then your task is much easier.

Solution

So if you have a test which is supposed to run with language that differs from the default language of your browser, you have following options. Let’s imagine you are writing the tests for German Locale.

• Change the default language of you operational system. Poor you. Now the most of the programs will be showing in German. Ordnung muss sein!
• Take your browser and setup it to be German the preferable language. Save away the profile. Google and experiment a lot about loading custom browser profile before starting your tests. Don’t forget to remove German from the top of preferred languages or otherwise, you know already, Ordnung….
• Just make use of Chrome preference “intl.accept_languages” and set it to “de” (for German).

Of course you can very easily do it in Selenide. Setup the system variable chromeoptions.prefs=intl.accept_languages=de

You can do it either in code:

System.setProperty("chromeoptions.prefs","intl.accept_languages=de");

or even better in configuration file of Maven or Gradle

Maven

maven pom.xml

  ...
  <plugin>
        <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.xx.yy</version>
        <configuration>
          <systemPropertyVariables>
            ...
            <chromeoptions.prefs>intl.accept_languages=de</chromeoptions.prefs>
          </systemPropertyVariables>
        </configuration>
    </plugin>
    ...

Gradle

likewise for gradle in gradle.properties (you additionally need a line or two in build.gradle to get this parameter transferred in to the test task in gradle)

systemProp.chromeoptions.prefs=intl.accept_languages=de

Command-line

You can then override the setting running mvn test or gradle test defining another value in the command line -Dchromeoptions.prefs=intl.accept_languages=ru

Example

Just run this short test and see the effect of different language settings.

open("http://wikipedia.org");
$("[data-jsl10n=slogan]").shouldHave(exactText("Die freie Enzyklopädie"));

I wish you all Fröhliche Weihnachten and Guten Rutsch!

Alexei Vinogradov

22.12.19