WebDriver tricks of the trade

April 16, 2012 — ...

A post to be used as a reference for items/issues that has surfaced when using WebDriver with Java.

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Muting WebDriver logs

At points where WebDriver is really verbose it is quite convenient to mute the output or at least certain levels of it.

// Java
// Set it before creating the WebDriver instance to avoid having any messages generated from the
// constructor call
RemoteWebDriver.setLogLevel(Level.WARNING); // java.util.logging.Level
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

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Avoiding untrusted SSL cerificate errors when using Firefox

Typical test environment issue. A simple workaround that worked for us was to simply set the profile used to accept and assume any certificate issues.

// Java
FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();
profile.setAcceptUntrustedCertificates(true);
profile.setAssumeUntrustedCertificateIssuer(false);
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

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Running FireFox in full screen

Especially handy when combining Sikuli and WebDriver, you need to be absolutely sure that as much as possible is visible on the screen.

((FirefoxDriver)driver).getKeyboard().pressKey(Keys.F11);

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Relative xpaths from the current WebElement

Very useful when working with complex HTML-pages whose elements are very deep down and can only be found using xpath. Maintaining these long xpaths in multiple places in the test code base is a pain. The solution is to do the xpathing in parts to minimize the effort needed to maintain the xpath-strings.

<html>
  <body>
    <table>
	  <tbody>
	    <th></th>
        <tr>
		  <td>cell to find</td><td></td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
		  <td></td><td></td>
		</tr>
      </tbody>
	</table>
  </body>
</html>

Starting the xpath-string with the DOT is equivalent to starting the search from the current node.

WebElement tableElement = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//html/body/table"));
// Using relative xpath from the beginning of the table to find the first cell.
// Note that it has to start with the '.', DOT
WebElement cell = driver.findElement(By.xpath("./tbody/tr[1]/td[1]"));

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Switching between open windows

Based on words in the page title.

Set<String> windows = driver.getWindowHandles();
for (String window : windows) {
  driver.switchTo().window(window);
  if (driver.getTitle().contains(pageTitle)) {
    break;
  }
}

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Dismissing/accepting alert dialog windows

Whenever an alert window pops-up it has to be accepted or dismissed to avoid blocking the test execution, this is simply handled using Alert class (Selenium docs).

// WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
Alert alert = driver.switchTo().alert();
alert.accept();
// OR
// alert.dismiss();
Posted in Browsers, certificates, Firefox, Java, ssl, test automation, WebDriver, xpath. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »