Switching between headed and headless for a single task in Selenium - selenium

Question

Is there any way to switch from headless to headed in the middle of a task in Selenium?
For example, I'm running some workflow headless, but in the middle I want the user to be able to push a button to see what the actual browser window looks like. How do I do that?

Answer 1

Not possible.
But it is possible to hide browser window from the screen :) :
driver.Manage().Window.Position =new Point(-2000, 0);

Answer 2

Unfortunately, switching between UI (headed) and HeadLess execution through selenium is not possible.
For example, Selenium creates an instance of browser of type WebDriver (either Firefox/Chrome/IE/HtmlUnit). Selenium can operate only on the instance it has created, and during creation time it will be defined if it is a UI test (Firefox/Chrome/IE) or Headless (HtmlUnit).
So, the design of Selenium prevents to switch between headless/UI execution in the middle of the test, as per your requirement.

Answer 3

Using xvfb you can do this. You can develop your tests using any driver, so, after configured the xvfb, you just need to use
xvfb-run tests
to run headless and if you don't want, you can run the tests without xvfb parameter.
A linux machine is required to use xvfb.

Answer 4

I've done this for one of my daily tasks - signin into firewall. It was a 2FA process, which required combo of browser interaction and a (random generated) token. For the first part a simple powershell script was running in headless mode, so when the site prompts for your token, it turns IE to visible and waits for user input. If such is provided, again switches to headless and finishes the process. The user is informed for success/fail of the operation with dialog message box.
You can start with such simple IE automation and optimize your .ps1 script later. The solution I was using back in the days:
$ie = new-object -ComObject "InternetExplorer.Application"
$requestUri = http://-your-site-here
# switch the browser headless mode on/off
#$ie.visible = $true
$ie.silent = $true
$ie.navigate($requestUri)
while($ie.Busy) { Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 100 }
# get DOM in order to interact
$doc = $ie.Document
$userInputId = "your-uname-id-here"
$doc.getElementsByTagName("input") | % {
if ($_.id -ne $null){
if ($_.id.Contains($userInputId)) { $_.value = "your-username-here" }
}
}
# can call JS events on elements
# like $btn.click()
Write-Verbose "Login Complete"