Selenium-WebDriver API Commands and Operations

Fetching a Page

The first thing you’re likely to want to do with WebDriver is navigate to a page.The normal way to do this is by calling “get”:

driver.get("http://www.google.com");

Dependent on several factors, including the OS/Browser combination,WebDriver may or may not wait for the page to load. In some circumstances,WebDriver may return control before the page has finished, or even started, loading.To ensure robustness, you need to wait for the element(s) to exist in the page usingExplicit and Implicit Waits.

Locating UI Elements (WebElements)

Locating elements in WebDriver can be done on the WebDriver instance itself or on a WebElement.Each of the language bindings expose a “Find Element” and “Find Elements” method. The first returnsa WebElement object otherwise it throws an exception. The latter returns a list of WebElements, it canreturn an empty list if no DOM elements match the query.

The “Find” methods take a locator or query object called “By”. “By” strategies are listed below.

By ID

This is the most efficient and preferred way to locate an element. Common pitfalls that UI developersmake is having non-unique id’s on a page or auto-generating the id, both should be avoided. A classon an html element is more appropriate than an auto-generated id.

Example of how to find an element that looks like this:

<div id="coolestWidgetEvah">...</div>

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("coolestWidgetEvah"));

By Class Name

“Class” in this case refers to the attribute on the DOM element. Often in practical use there aremany DOM elements with the same class name, thus finding multiple elements becomes the more practicaloption over finding the first element.

Example of how to find an element that looks like this:

<div class="cheese"><span>Cheddar</span></div><div class="cheese"><span>Gouda</span></div>

List<WebElement> cheeses = driver.findElements(By.className("cheese"));

By Tag Name

The DOM Tag Name of the element.

Example of how to find an element that looks like this:

<iframe src="..."></iframe>

WebElement frame = driver.findElement(By.tagName("iframe"));

By Name

Find the input element with matching name attribute.

Example of how to find an element that looks like this:

<input name="cheese" type="text"/>

WebElement cheese = driver.findElement(By.name("cheese"));

By Link Text

Find the link element with matching visible text.

Example of how to find an element that looks like this:

<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=cheese">cheese</a>>

WebElement cheese = driver.findElement(By.linkText("cheese"));

By Partial Link Text

Find the link element with partial matching visible text.

Example of how to find an element that looks like this:

<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=cheese">search for cheese</a>>

WebElement cheese = driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("cheese"));

By CSS

Like the name implies it is a locator strategy by css. Native browser supportis used by default, so please refer to w3c css selectors <http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS/#selectors>for a list of generally available css selectors. If a browser does not havenative support for css queries, then Sizzle is used. IE 6,7 and FF3.0currently use Sizzle as the css query engine.

Beware that not all browsers were created equal, some css that might work in one version may not workin another.

Example of to find the cheese below:

<div id="food"><span class="dairy">milk</span><span class="dairy aged">cheese</span></div>

WebElement cheese = driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("#food span.dairy.aged"));

By XPATH

At a high level, WebDriver uses a browser’s native XPath capabilities whereverpossible. On those browsers that don’t have native XPath support, we haveprovided our own implementation. This can lead to some unexpected behaviourunless you are aware of the differences in the various xpath engines.

DriverTag and Attribute NameAttribute ValuesNative XPath Support

HtmlUnit Driver	Lower-cased	As they appear in the HTML	Yes
Internet Explorer Driver	Lower-cased	As they appear in the HTML	No
Firefox Driver	Case insensitive	As they appear in the HTML	Yes

This is a little abstract, so for the following piece of HTML:

<input type="text" name="example" />
<INPUT type="text" name="other" />

List<WebElement> inputs = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//input"));

The following number of matches will be found

XPath expressionHtmlUnit DriverFirefox DriverInternet Explorer Driver

//input	1 (“example”)	2	2
//INPUT	0	2	0

Sometimes HTML elements do not need attributes to be explicitly declaredbecause they will default to known values. For example, the “input” tag doesnot require the “type” attribute because it defaults to “text”. The rule ofthumb when using xpath in WebDriver is that you should not expect to be ableto match against these implicit attributes.

Using JavaScript

You can execute arbitrary javascript to find an element and as long as you return a DOM Element,it will be automatically converted to a WebElement object.

Simple example on a page that has jQuery loaded:

WebElement element = (WebElement) ((JavascriptExecutor)driver).executeScript("return $('.cheese')[0]");

Finding all the input elements to the every label on a page:

List<WebElement> labels = driver.findElements(By.tagName("label"));
List<WebElement> inputs = (List<WebElement>) ((JavascriptExecutor)driver).executeScript(
    "var labels = arguments[0], inputs = []; for (var i=0; i < labels.length; i++){" +
    "inputs.push(document.getElementById(labels[i].getAttribute('for'))); } return inputs;", labels);

User Input - Filling In Forms

We’ve already seen how to enter text into a textarea or text field, but whatabout the other elements? You can “toggle” the state of checkboxes, and youcan use “click” to set something like an OPTION tag selected. Dealingwith SELECT tags isn’t too bad:

WebElement select = driver.findElement(By.tagName("select"));
List<WebElement> allOptions = select.findElements(By.tagName("option"));
for (WebElement option : allOptions) {
    System.out.println(String.format("Value is: %s", option.getAttribute("value")));
    option.click();
}

This will find the first “SELECT” element on the page, and cycle through eachof its OPTIONs in turn, printing out their values, and selecting each in turn.As you will notice, this isn’t the most efficient way of dealing with SELECTelements. WebDriver’s support classes include one called “Select”, whichprovides useful methods for interacting with these.

Select select = new Select(driver.findElement(By.tagName("select")));
select.deselectAll();
select.selectByVisibleText("Edam");

This will deselect all OPTIONs from the first SELECT on the page, and thenselect the OPTION with the displayed text of “Edam”.

Once you’ve finished filling out the form, you probably want to submit it. Oneway to do this would be to find the “submit” button and click it:

driver.findElement(By.id("submit")).click();

Alternatively, WebDriver has the convenience method “submit” on every element.If you call this on an element within a form, WebDriver will walk up the DOMuntil it finds the enclosing form and then calls submit on that. If theelement isn’t in a form, then the NoSuchElementException will be thrown:

element.submit();

Moving Between Windows and Frames

Some web applications have many frames or multiple windows. WebDriver supportsmoving between named windows using the “switchTo” method:

driver.switchTo().window("windowName");

All calls to driver will now be interpreted as being directed to theparticular window. But how do you know the window’s name? Take a look at thejavascript or link that opened it:

<a href="somewhere.html" target="windowName">Click here to open a new window</a>

Alternatively, you can pass a “window handle” to the “switchTo().window()”method. Knowing this, it’s possible to iterate over every open window like so:

for (String handle : driver.getWindowHandles()) {
    driver.switchTo().window(handle);
}

You can also switch from frame to frame (or into iframes):

driver.switchTo().frame("frameName");

It’s possible to access subframes by separating the path with a dot, and youcan specify the frame by its index too. That is:

driver.switchTo().frame("frameName.0.child");

would go to the frame named “child” of the first subframe of the frame called“frameName”. All frames are evaluated as if from *top*.

Popup Dialogs

Starting with Selenium 2.0 beta 1, there is built in support for handling popupdialog boxes. After you’ve triggered an action that opens apopup, you can access the alert with the following:

Alert alert = driver.switchTo().alert();

This will return the currently open alert object. With this object you can now accept,dismiss, read its contents or even type into a prompt. This interface works equallywell on alerts, confirms, and prompts. Refer to the JavaDocsor RubyDocs for more information.

Navigation: History and Location

Earlier, we covered navigating to a page using the “get” command (driver.get("http://www.example.com")) As you’ve seen, WebDriver has anumber of smaller, task-focused interfaces, and navigation is a useful task.Because loading a page is such a fundamental requirement, the method to do thislives on the main WebDriver interface, but it’s simply a synonym to:

driver.navigate().to("http://www.example.com");

To reiterate: “navigate().to()” and “get()” do exactly the same thing.One’s just a lot easier to type than the other!

The “navigate” interface also exposes the ability to move backwards and forwards in your browser’s history:

driver.navigate().forward();
driver.navigate().back();

Please be aware that this functionality depends entirely on the underlyingbrowser. It’s just possible that something unexpected may happen when you callthese methods if you’re used to the behaviour of one browser over another.

Cookies

Before we leave these next steps, you may be interested in understanding how touse cookies. First of all, you need to be on the domain that the cookie will bevalid for. If you are trying to preset cookies beforeyou start interacting with a site and your homepage is large / takes a while to loadan alternative is to find a smaller page on the site, typically the 404 page is small(http://example.com/some404page)

// Go to the correct domain
driver.get("http://www.example.com");

// Now set the cookie. This one's valid for the entire domain
Cookie cookie = new Cookie("key", "value");
driver.manage().addCookie(cookie);

// And now output all the available cookies for the current URL
Set<Cookie> allCookies = driver.manage().getCookies();
for (Cookie loadedCookie : allCookies) {
    System.out.println(String.format("%s -> %s", loadedCookie.getName(), loadedCookie.getValue()));
}

// You can delete cookies in 3 ways
// By name
driver.manage().deleteCookieNamed("CookieName");
// By Cookie
driver.manage().deleteCookie(loadedCookie);
// Or all of them
driver.manage().deleteAllCookies();

Changing the User Agent

This is easy with the Firefox Driver:

FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();
profile.addAdditionalPreference("general.useragent.override", "some UA string");
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

Drag And Drop

Here’s an example of using the Actions class to perform a drag and drop.Native events are required to be enabled.

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.name("source"));
WebElement target = driver.findElement(By.name("target"));

(new Actions(driver)).dragAndDrop(element, target).perform();