Glossary
This glossary defines key terms and concepts used in Doc Detective documentation.
Action
A command that Doc Detective performs within a step of a test. Actions include tasks like navigating to a URL, clicking an element, or taking a screenshot. See Actions for the complete list.
AsciiDoc
A lightweight markup language for technical documentation. Doc Detective supports AsciiDoc files with inline and detected tests. See AsciiDoc input format.
Context
A combination of platform (operating system) and browser where tests run. You can define contexts at the config, spec, or test level to control where tests execute. See Contexts.
CSS selector
A pattern used to select HTML elements on a page. CSS selectors are the recommended way to target elements in Doc Detective tests. See CSS selectors.
Detected tests
Tests automatically generated by Doc Detective based on your documentation source files. Detected tests use markup patterns to identify testable content. See Detected tests.
DITA
Darwin Information Typing Architecture, an XML-based format for technical documentation. Doc Detective can extract tests from DITA task topics using semantic markup. See DITA input format.
Inline tests
Tests defined directly in documentation source files using specially formatted comments. Inline tests keep test definitions close to the content they validate. See Inline tests.
Input format
The file format of your documentation source files. Doc Detective supports Markdown, DITA, AsciiDoc, HTML, and custom formats. See Input formats.
Markup pattern
A regular expression pattern used to detect testable content in documentation. You define markup patterns in the fileTypes configuration to enable detected tests. See Detected tests.
Selector
A pattern used to identify UI elements for interaction in tests. Doc Detective supports CSS selectors and XPath selectors. See CSS selectors and XPath selectors.
Specification
The highest-level component of a test suite, also called a test spec. A specification is a collection of tests that should run together and can share configuration. See Tests overview.
Step
A single action within a test. Each step performs one action and acts as an assertion that the action completes as expected. See Tests overview.
Surface
An addressable target a step acts on. It’s either a browser (a whole session, a window, or a tab) or a background process. Steps select a surface with the surface field. Omitting it acts on the active surface, which is the most recently opened or focused one. goTo opens browser surfaces, runShell and runCode start process surfaces, and closeSurface closes any of them. See Test across multiple tabs, windows, and browsers.
Test
A sequence of steps to perform as part of a test specification. Each test has a name and a set of steps that validate documentation accuracy. See Tests overview.
Test specification
See Specification.
XPath selector
An XML path expression used to navigate and select elements in HTML or XML documents. XPath selectors provide more complex element selection than CSS selectors. See XPath selectors.