Protractor with Typescript

Typescript provides code auto completion and helpful hints with a text editor like Microsoft's Visual Studio Code or another text editor with Typescript support.

Note that this example uses TypeScript 2.0.

# Examples

There are two examples in this directory:

- Simple Protractor example
  - Similar to the github protractor example
  - Files `conf.ts` and `spec.ts`
- Page objects example
  - Follows the protractortest.org page objects example
  - Files `confPageObjects.ts`, `specPageObjects.ts`, and `angularPage.ts`

# File organization

exampleTypescript/
|- node_modules/ // downloaded node modules
|- tmp/ // compiled javascript output
|
|- .gitignore // since typescript produces javascript, we should not
| // commit javascript to the repo
|- angularPage.ts // page object example
|- confPageObjects.ts // configuration for the page objects example
|- package.json // node dependencies for the project
|- README.md // this file
|- spec.ts // spec for the simple protractor example
|- specPageObjects.ts // spec for the page objects example
|- tsconfig.json // typescript transpile configuration

# Getting started

This package.json references the local protractor directory with `"protractor": "file: ../"`. For the type declarations to work, from the protractor directory run an `npm install` to generate the declarations file.

Next, install the exampleTypescript node_modules with:

npm install

# Protractor typings

To use Protractor types, you'll need to import `protractor`. After this is imported, you should have autocompletion hints when typing.

import {browser, element, by, By, $, $$, ExpectedConditions} from 'protractor';

Although the Protractor configuration file can be written in javascript, creating it in typescript will have some hints. These hints and the reference configuration can be found in `lib/config.ts`. Below we are importing the Config interface and applying that interface to the config variable:

import {Config} from 'protractor';
export let config: Config = {
...
}

# Ambient typings

Protractor also uses ambient types including jasmine, jasminewd2, and node. These are brought in via the `tsconfig.json` file, which uses npm module resolution to get types from `node_modules/@types`.

If you are using the jasmine framework for your tests, make sure to do:

npm install --save-dev @types/jasmine @types/jasminewd2

# Compiling your code

To convert your typescript to javascript (transpiling), you'll use the Typescript compiler (tsc). If you install typescript globally, the command is `tsc`. If it is not installed globally, the typescript compiler can be executed with `npm run tsc`.

# Running Protractor

After transpiling your code to javascript, you'll run Protractor like before: `protractor conf.js`

# Helpful links

- TypescriptLang.org tutorial
- TypescriptLang.org tsconfig.json
- Typescript gitter
- Typescript stackoverflow