Page Object Model Best Practices in Selenium

Question

When you are modelling your page objects, how would you deal with a page which has form and about 50 input fields on it? What is the best practice here?

Would you create a page object and write a separate function for each input action? or would you write one function which parameters are passed to it and enters the text?

e.g.

public void enterFirstName(String firstName) {
    driver.type("firstNameField", firstName);
}

public void enterSecondName(String secondName) {
    driver.type("secondNameField", secondName);
}

or

public void fillInForm(String inputFieldName, String text) {
    driver.type(inputFieldName, text);
}

I can see in the first model, when writing tests, the tests are more descriptive, but if the page contains too many input fields, creating the page object becomes cumbersome.

This post is also quite interesting in structuring selenium tests in Page Objects Functional Automated Testing Best Practices with Selenium WebDriver

Answer 1

The idea behind the page object model is that it abstracts the implementation away from the caller. In the first mechanism, you are successfully doing that because the caller doesn't need to know if the html input field name changes from "firstName" to "user_first_name", whereas in your second implementation any changes to the actual page would have to be trickled out to all callers of your page object.

While it may be more work up front to create your page object, if you maintain the encapsulation it'll save work in the long run when the real html page inevitably changes.