What is BidiChecker?

BidiChecker (http://code.google.com/p/bidichecker) is a tool for the automated testing of web pages for errors in support of right-to-left (RTL) languages (such as Arabic and Hebrew), also known as bidirectional (BiDi) because they routinely include left-to-right items such as numbers and Latin-script words and phrases.

Why you should care about BiDi

BiDi support for a web page is a common requirement, even for pages in left-to-right scripts. Any page which accepts user input or displays multilingual content is likely to end up handling bidirectional text at some point, as it will eventually encounter data in Arabic, Hebrew or another RTL language. Unfortunately, handling bidirectional text can be tricky and requires special processing at every appearance of potentially BiDi data in the UI. (Examples of common BiDi UI bugs can be found here.) As a result, BiDi text support often regresses when a developer adds a new feature and simply forgets about BiDi.

BidiChecker and Chrome

Chrome has a mechanism called WebUI, which displays parts of the Chrome UI using web content (e.g. Chrome's preferences). BidiChecker can automatically test such pages for common BiDi errors, and report any regressions. Currently, BidiChecker is being run as part of Chrome's standard unit test suite.

Adding BidiChecker Tests for your WebUI page

There are two cases which BidiChecker is used to verify:

1. Running with an LTR UI and displaying RTL contents. Example: Active UI language is English while page has some Arabic content.
2. Running with an RTL UI and displaying LTR contents. Example: Active UI language is Hebrew while page has some English content.

Your page needs to test for both cases. Luckily this is really simple:

1. Add a test case in chrome/browser/ui/webui/bidi_checker_web_ui_test.cc that uses the WebUIBidiCheckerBrowserTestLTR fixture class. Set up mock content in Hebrew or Arabic, and launch BidiChecker. This runs the test in an LTR environment. It should look something like this:
   IN_PROC_BROWSER_TEST_F(WebUIBidiCheckerBrowserTestLTR, MyAwesomeTest) {
  // Custom code to fill in some RTL (Arabic, Hebrew, etc) contents in the page
  const char* myURL = // A URL to your page goes here
  RunBidiCheckerOnPage(myURL);
}
2. Repeat the above but use WebUIBidiCheckerBrowserTestRTL as the test fixture class:
   IN_PROC_BROWSER_TEST_F(WebUIBidiCheckerBrowserTestRTL, MyAwesomeTest) {
  // Custom code to fill in some LTR (English) contents in the page
  const char* myURL = // A URL to your page goes here
  RunBidiCheckerOnPage(myURL);
}