Selenium Workbook #48: Verify PDF Content

Assert text in PDF file

This article is one of the “Web Test Automation Workbook” series, a set of bite-sized exercises (typically 15–20 mins). A practical and satisfying way to learn web test automation with Selenium WebDriver.

Learning Objectives

• Verify the content of a PDF file with pdf-reader
• Introduce third-party gems, including installation

Test Case #48

Test design

• Print an invoice (See Exercise #47)
• Verify the invoice number and total amount in the PDF matches the page.

Test Data:

Login (business): physio@biz.com (password: test01)

This test is easy to perform manually. A manual tester would double-click to open the downloaded PDF file. Then visually inspect it against the web page.

Automated test scripts, by default, cannot ‘read’ the PDF’s content. Selenium WebDriver is a web automation library (for non-coders, you can consider a library as a utility), we can use it to drive a browser and retrieve the source of web pages. But to retrieve a PDF document’s content, we would use help from a PDF library, pdf-reader.