A Navigation Graph Builder for Dynamic Web Applications

Manually generating navigation graphs for dynamic Web applications is a challenging task because of the page explosion problem, i.e., the astronomical number of dynamic pages in a dynamic web application. To generate navigation graphs practically, this paper presents Tansuo, a tool for semiautomatically generating navigation graphs for dynamic web applications. Tansuo has two novelties: (1) solving the page explosion problem by intelligently abstracting navigation structures; (2) capturing dynamic navigation structures by achieving pairwise coverage among values of form parameters. Tansuo has been applied to generate navigation graphs for five open source Web applications. Empirical results indicate that Tansuo can efficiently generate Web navigation graphs for these applications.