Description

In a former Hackweek project I created a simple script to automate the check for changed SAP Notes. It is based on Selenium to get the information from the related SAP Websites.
Some time ago I stumbled over an interesting article in iX about Playwright, which gave the idea for this project.

Goals

Learn Playwright and see, if it is really simpler to use than Selenium and replace Selenium in my script with Playwright, if the needed features are working.

Resources

Result

Playwright provides a simple, quick setup and configuration. If on a fully supported system.
On a Leap15.6 the installation complains about missing dependencies (libraries) to run the Playwright internal browsers. But when running test, everything is working. So ignored for now.
Fast start for beginners because of good examples and the Playwright Code Generator.
The Playwright Code Generator is a nice and easy to handle tool to create a prototype of a test by interacting with the Web Browser. You get the selectors of the website without looking at the inspection tab of the browser. It's much easier than scanning the DOM and writing the test from scratch by yourself even that the result needs some cleanup and beautifying.

Negative: The native installed browsers on the system are not supported, only the shipped one by playwright.
Impact: When using a TLS client certificate to authenticate against the website it's not possible by simply create a special browser profile and import the certificate to this browser profile. Instead the authentication needs to be done in the test. That's easy possible, but you need to provide the passphrase for the certificate inside the test. Tests with reading the passphrase from a file leads to errors. Need to investigate later why and how to workaround.

So the first setup and the start to get a working test is easier than with Selenium, but when working with complex websites the effort to get the expected results are equal.
For now my current running script for the SAP Notes will stay with Selenium (so no rewrite), but when starting to work on the second part (automatically get SAP Note diffs) I will probably go with Playwright.