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NHtmlUnit

NHtmlUnit is a .NET wrapper of HtmlUnit; a "GUI-less browser for Java programs".

Introduction

We really like the HtmlUnit project, which enables headless web testing without needing to have a complete browser running. By using IKVM it is possible to convert the HtmlUnit Java library for use on Microsoft's .NET platform.

However, it doesn't feel very natural to use a java library in a .NET language, and therefore we created an HtmlUnit wrapper written in C#, so you can write tests for your web pages in clean C# code (or any code running on the .NET platform).

Downloading NHtmlUnit

The recommended way to download NHtmlUnit is through its NuGet package. If you want to build it yourself, read the next section.

Building NHtmlUnit

If you want to build your own version of NHtmlUnit, you can use MSBuild or Visual Studio 2010.

After building you can find NHtmlUnit.dll plus its dependencies here:

  • app\NHtmlUnit\bin\Debug
  • app\NHtmlUnit\bin\Release

Usage

For now there is no manual or API reference written for NHtmlUnit. You can however use the HtmlUnit reference, as this wrapper almost completely reflects the original API.

The difference is that Java iterators, lists and collections are exposed as their .NET-friendly counterparts (IEnumerable, IList and ICollection). In addition, properties are "real" .NET properties, so obj.getSomething() and obj.setSomething() is exposed as obj.Something.

NHtmlUnitGenerator

The NHtmlUnitGenerator executable only needs to be run when the HtmlUnit jar file has changed. When NHtmlUnitGenerator is run it will overwrite all files in app\NHtmlUnit\Generated.

Note that it doesn't do anything with the project files, so if classes are added or removed from the origin HtmlUnit jar file this will not be synchronized. You have to manually add new files to the project.

License

NHtmlUnit is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0, which is the same license used for HtmlUnit.

Technical details

NHtmlUnit has in large parts been auto-generated using the HtmlUnit jar file as input to the excellent IKVM project. How it is generated can be seen in the Make.cmd file located inside the lib/NHtmlUnit folder.

Although we consider NHtmlUnit itself to be of decent quality, the NHtmlUnitGenerator is basically a large hack.

Future

A complete rewrite of the NHtmlUnitGenerator using Mono.Cecil would be nice, although we're unsure exactly how much this would do for the final product.

Authours

NHtmlUnit was written by Asbjørn Ulsberg and Karsten Strand at OKB AS.