If you’re enabling CORS on your ASP.NET web service, you’ll be receiving an ‘Origin’ header and outputting an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header if you’re happy to receive the request. If you’re being strict about your access control policy, you’ll be returning the same origin you got rather than * so that the user agent knows to let the call continue.

This poses a bit of an obstacle when combined with ASP.NET Output Caching, as unless you either tell it to vary its output by all headers or explicitly call out the Origin header you may find that accessing your service from two URLs within your cache lifetime period will see one call succeed and the other fail.

The failing call is because the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header’s being sent from the cache, but for the broken site won’t match the Origin that was sent to it and since we’ve not configured output caching to vary by the Origin header it assumes the requests from the two different origins are the same and responds accordingly.So, we just need to tack in the Origin header into our cache configuration’s varyByHeader attribute (separated from other headers with a semicolon, if any others exist) and bingo! The two sites result in correct responses.

This Stack Overflow post by MrBlueSky describes how to determine element visibility in a WatiN test case. As a convenience, here’s that code refactored as an extension method on Browser:

public static class BrowserExtensions
{
    public static bool IsElementVisible(this Browser browser, Element element)
    {
        var command = string.Format("$('#{0}').is(':visible');", element.Id);
        return browser.Eval(command) == "true";
    }
}

Usage:

            using (var browser = new IE("http://example.com/login.aspx"))
            {
                var page = browser.Page<Login>();

                page.LoginButton.Click();

                Assert.IsTrue(browser.IsElementVisible(page.UsernameRequiredMessage));
                Assert.IsTrue(browser.IsElementVisible(page.PasswordRequiredMessage));
            }