Automate Testing Web Forms That Generate Reports

Background

I'm working on a project which is written in C# and ASP.Net. It's web-based and the sole purpose of the project is pretty much to generate reports.

There are about ~350+ reports which you can navigate to through a "report tree" (that which is like a folder tree on a typical windows machine).

Each of these reports has pretty much the same structure where when you visit the report page you're provided a "navigation" style bar at the top which presents a myriad of different drop-downs. When you drill down through the drop down the user may or may not be presented with another drop-down to further specify the report they want. Once the drop-downs have all be selected the user clicks "Generate Report". A loading screen shows for a few seconds to low minutes while the report is generated and then the report is loaded.

What I'm After

What I'd like to know is if there is some kind of framework that exists for testing a situation similar to this. I've heard of browser automation and applications like Selenium but I want to know if that product will work for my situation.

Specifics

Here are the specs on the project

• Written in ASP.Net/C#


• T-SQL DB


• Has to work in Internet Explorer (preferably IE11)


• Has to be able to test all the drop-downs mentioned to be sure they drop-down menus have the desired content


• Must be able to automatically generate the report, start a timer, and then tell me how long that report took to generate

I'm not looking for a complete system that somebody has already written. I know my project is too specific for something like that to be remotely possible. I'd like to be pointed in the direction of a system that will provide the framework for me to put something like this together and automate the testing of ~350 different otherwise manually driven tests.