configurable browser name parsing (feature)

[websurgeon]

It would be nice to be able to customise how testacular outputs the browser name

One way to do this would be to allow setting of a browserNamePaser function as part of testacular.conf.js that overrides helper.browserFullNameToShort.

It would also be better to provide this functionality as part of the helper module rather than overriding the function externally.

Although this would work ok it does not seem correct to have/allow functions in the testacular.conf.js file.

Maybe providing a regular expression and some sort of template for the output would be a better solution.

I'd be interested to hear what everyone thinks about this and hopefully come up with a cleaner solution than I have suggested :-)

Example use case:
When testacular runs inside an iOS WebView (e.g. When running inside a Cordova app) the format of the userAgent string does not match the expected pattern used by the helper.browserFullNameToShort method.
This results in the entire userAgent string being output and so makes it hard to distinguish between multiple iOS devices

e.g. difference between userAgent strings from Safari vs WebView on simulator:

Safari on iPad 0.6.1 Simulator
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 6_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10B141 Safari/8536.25

WebView on iPad 0.6.1 Simulator
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/10B141 (177567616)

NB: real iOS devices have a similar userAgent string for WebViews (as is to be expected)

Having had a brief play around with the testacular code I was able to get this functionality by ammending lib\config.js:

• added browserNameParser property to config object in parseConfig function (default to null)

• added the following code if statement

  // merge options from cli
  config = util.merge(config, cliOptions || {})

  // allow custom brower name (userAgent) parsing
  if (typeof config.browserNameParser === 'function') {
  util.browserFullNameToShort = config.browserNameParser;
  }

As mentioned previously I don't suggest that this is the way to do it but was just a proof of concept for my own temporary use.

[dignifiedquire]

I don't think this needs to be configurable. What about just adding more userAgent strings to the list maintained by karma. Maybe we could use something like : 3rd-Eden/useragent

[vojtajina]

Yep, let's just add all the browser agent strings out there. No reason for making this configurable...

[websurgeon]

Fair point. I suppose this configuration idea is a bit of an overkill. Just updating ua strings is ok by me.

[dignifiedquire]

I've created a version using said module that should solve this problem :)