I'm trying to implement a java program that will execute simple selenese commands with a local webdriver.
is there an API that gets a string such as "clickAndWait" and executes it? The WebDriverCommandProcessor class doesn't seem to do the trick.
The WebDriver Java API is primarily the methods of WebDriver and WebElement. There is no method that takes a command string and executes it. But the Java API is a wrapper around another protocol, which is string-based. Check out the WebDriver WebDriver Wire Protocol, which is what a WebDriver language binding (client) uses to communicate with a WebDriver browser-driver (server). The commands do not map directly to "selenese" (the client language of Selenium IDE), but you can build the actions up to make them so.
Related
I'm curious what the Selenium class called "Service" is.
Would this be useful for setting up a Chrome driver as opposed to invoking a webdriver through my_driver = webdriver.Chrome(...)?
I looked up the docs but they're not helpful in describing the purpose:
https://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/api.html#module-selenium.webdriver.common.service
Service is the new class introduced in selenium 4 to start a webdriver:
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=Service(your_chromedriver_path))
The previous method is deprecated:
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=your_chromedriver_path)
in fact if you run it, then it raises a warning
DeprecationWarning: executable_path has been deprecated, please pass in a Service object
This service is introduce to manage the driver process. So that you can kill it after your tests are done.
Basically invoking quit does not put any obligations to webdriver to stop existing as the process. On the contrary webdriver is a service that is aimed to process concurrent sessions from different clients. So once your tests are stopped the webdriver might still be running.
When you start your tests using Service you now get an interface to kill that remote process using the obtained reference.
What is Selenium?
When you open the official page of the Selenium, the first thing you read is "Selenium automates browser" in "What is Selenium?" section.
The section "Which part of Selenium is appropriate for me?" below offers the choice between Selenium WebDriver and Selenium IDE.
From this, I deduce that Selenium is a collection of tools and the collection comprises IDE, WebDriver API(language binding), Grid, Selenium Standalone Server, browser driver. One has to download the appropriate ones to build a project.
What is WebDriver?
WebDriver is an API. It is written in more than one language which and they are called language bindings. The API has functions to control a browser. You use the functions in writing a script that controls a browser in the way(test case) you want.
This is what I know. Please correct me wherever I'm wrong. I want to know the answers to the two questions in the interview point of view.
Selenium
Selenium is a free (open source) automated testing suite for web applications across different browsers and platforms. Primarily it is used for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Selenium has the support of all of the major browser vendors who have taken (or are taking) steps to make Selenium a native part of their browser. It is also the core technology in countless other browser automation tools, APIs and frameworks.
Selenium is not just a single tool but a set of different software tools each with a different approach to support the test automation of an organization. From a broader perspective previously it had four components as follows:
Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
Selenium Remote Control (RC)
WebDriver
Selenium Grid
An year ago, Selenium RC and WebDriver are merged into a single framework to form Selenium 2.x. Perhaps, Selenium 1 refers to Selenium RC. The current released version is Selenium 3.x.
WebDriver
Selenium-RC worked the same way for each supported browser. It injected javascript functions into the browser when the browser was loaded and then used its javascript to drive the AUT within the browser. Selenium WebDriver fits in the same role as Selenium-RC did and has incorporated the original 1.x bindings and included the WebDriver API. It refers to both the language bindings and the implementations of the individual browser controlling code. This is commonly referred to as just WebDriver. In short, WebDriver is the remote control interface that enables introspection and control of user agents. WebDriver provides a platform and language-neutral wire protocol as a way for out-of-process programs to remotely instruct the behavior of web browsers.
Highlights of WebDriver
WebDriver is designed in a simpler and more concise programming interface along with addressing some limitations in the Selenium-RC API.
WebDriver is a compact Object Oriented API when compared to Selenium1.0
It drives the browser much more effectively and overcomes the limitations of Selenium 1.x which affected our functional test coverage, like the file upload or download, pop-ups and dialogs barrier
WebDriver overcomes the limitation of Selenium RC's Single Host origin policy.
Current Implementation
WebDriver is the name of the key interface against which tests should be written in Java/C#/Ruby/Python/NodeJS, the implementing classes which you can use are listed as below:
ChromeDriver
EventFiringWebDriver
FirefoxDriver
HtmlUnitDriver
InternetExplorerDriver
PhantomJSDriver
RemoteWebDriver
SafariDriver
What is Selenium
It is a suite of tools that can be used to automate web browsers testing.
Each tool serves different purpose.
List of tools:
Selenium IDE
Selenium RC
WebDriver
Selenium Grid
Selenium RC was merged with WebDriver since Selenium 2
What is WebDriver
Selenium WebDriver is an interface that permits us to execute tests over browsers.
Selenium WebDriver allows us to choose a programming language of your choice to create test scripts.
Please find the image below explaining how exactly WebDriver communicates with the browser :
What is Selenium?
Selenium is a framework where scripts are written to run and execute webDriver which in turn controls browser.
What is WebDriver?
WebDriver is an API, the name itself suggests driving the web browser or controlling the web browser by using libraries and commands.
The one and only job of WebDriver is to control the browser, it doesn't know anything about testing and how to interact with browser, At this point FrameWork comes into picture where Scripts are written to run and execute WebDriver.
What is Selenium?
You can say it is a web application automation framework.
What is WebDriver?
This is certainly an API but to understand easily you can think it as a library collection.
I think it's also worth noting that the WebDriver controls the browser, and that Selenium is the piece that sends/receives method calls and data from/to the driver using the "wire protocol" that the WebDriver creates. So the WebDriver is the bridge from the browser to any other code that wants to communicate with it. Selenium also provides an interface (in the coding sense...) that is standard across different WebDrivers. So when you declare a WebDriver type it is implementing the interface. (This is my current understanding anyway and I'm always learning something new!)
Why is the code //RemoteWebDriver driver= new FirefoxDriver(); not used instead of //WebDriver driver= new FirefoxDriver() to create a driver object?
I feel that RemoteWebDriver gives more capabilities for the driver instance than webdriver reference. Can someone clarify this?
WebDriver will start up a web browser on the computer where the code instantiates it. For example. If you write a bit of code, and then run it to see how you are doing, the browser will pop up on your screen and you will see WebDriver begin to manipulate that web browser window (if everything went well!)
With a major exception which I will explain below, RemoteWebDriver will do the same thing; it will open and manipulate a browser window (if everything went well!) Generally speaking, You can actually switch the instatiation of a WebDriver with a RemoteWebDriver (well, there are advanced cases where you might not be able too do this) The major difference is that RemoteWebDriver sends that request to open and control a web browser to a server, so you normally wouldn’t see the browser open and do it’s thing.
Selenium server is the program that runs and waits for RemoteWebDriver connections. You can run it on your local computer to test it out. If you get it set up and running, you’ll be able to create a RemoteWebDriver and see that the Selenium server accepts the connection and allows you to control the web browser window.
The gains from using RemoteWebDriver?
If you can do connect to a local Selenium server, you can be confident that you have the knowledge and skills needed to connect to a remote Selenium server, or even to a paid service like SauceLabs (Hosting Selenium for you) that allows you to run lots of tests on lots of OS’s and lots of browsers without having to actually maintain or install any of them (Linux, Windows 8, Windows 10, MacOS, Andriod, IOS, IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Firefox Mobile, etc) You’ll want to look into running tests asynchronously at this point. You don’t have to run them one at a time, so can test a large number of OS/Browser variations in a very short time.
What does it mean when something is used only for client/server communication?
When you uses a Selenium grid with have one hub and multiple clients, you invoke RemoteWebDriver through which you instantiate the server and and make the request to it.
WebDriver is an interface in selenium which extends SearchContext interface (super most interface in selenium)
Where as RemoteWebdriver is a class which implements WebDriver,
We can use RemoteWebdriver, when we going to execute the test in romote environment,(selenium grid).
WebDriver interface will invoke the driver locally,
Currently in automation mostly we are using WebDriver only.
Grid not using widely.
WebDriver driver=new ChromeDriver() ;
driver is the reference variable where used to access chromedriver class.
Using driver instance we can access all the unimplemented methods available in WebDriver interface, also able to access all the properties available in chromedriver class.
For more details
https://www.softwaretestingmaterial.com/webdriver-driver-new-firefoxdriver/
I have been using selenium webdriver as my main method to do functional tests. So far its been working greate with our product.
I need to do some performance and/or load tests on the website, I was wondering if there is a tool that would incorporate my selenium tests or a tool which i can use with the recorded tests as the base.
Currently i am using selenium webdriver with C#
Any help is appreciated.
Given you have tests written in C# the most obvious way would be using Visual Studio Load Testing capabilities.
If you are looking for a free and open-source solution I would recommend going for Apache JMeter. JMeter has integration with Selenium via WebDriver Sampler plugin so you should be able to run your Selenium tests in multi-threaded manner. However you will need to convert your C# code into one of the WebDriver Sampler supported languages (default is JavaScript)
Remember that Selenium tests are very resource-intensive as real browsers consume a lot of CPU/RAM so the number of virtual users you will be able to mimic this way will be very limited. So recommended approach is creating main load on a HTTP protocol level and use one Selenium instance to check rendering speed while your application is under the load.
You can install WebDriver Sampler plugin using JMeter Plugins Manager.
Why do you need to run full browsers. HTTP layer tests are far simpler? You also should be looking at only a subset of business processes in performance which generate a preponderance of load.
I'm not sure I quite understand the difference. WebDriver API also directly controls the browser of choice. When should you use selenium remote control (selenium RC) instead ?
Right now, my current situation is I am testing a web application by writing a suite with Selenium WebDriver API and letting it run on my computer. The tests are taking longer and longer to complete, so I have been searching for ways to run the tests on a Linux server.
If I use Selenium Remote Control, does this mean I have to rewrite everything I wrote with WebDriver API?
I am getting confused with Selenium Grid, Hudson, Selenium RC. I found a Selenium Grid plugin for Hudson, but not sure if this includes Selenium RC.
Am I taking the correct route? I envision the following architecture:
Hudson running on few Ubuntu dedicated servers.
Hudson running with Xvnc & Selenium Grid plugin. (Do I need to install Firefox separately ?)
Selenium grid running selenium RC test suites.
I think this is far more time efficient than running test on my current working desktop computer with WebDriver API.
WebDriver is now Selenium 2. The Selenium and WebDriver code bases are being merged. WebDriver gets over a number of issues that Selenium has and Selenium gets over a number of issues that Webdriver has.
If you have written your tests in Selenium one you don't have to rewrite them to work with Selenium 2. We, the core developers, have written it so that you create a browser instance and inject that into Selenium and your Selenium 1 tests will work in Selenium 2. I have put an example below for you.
// You may use any WebDriver implementation. Firefox is used here as an example
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
// A "base url", used by selenium to resolve relative URLs
String baseUrl = "http://www.google.com";
// Create the Selenium implementation
Selenium selenium = new WebDriverBackedSelenium(driver, baseUrl);
// Perform actions with selenium
selenium.open("http://www.google.com");
selenium.type("name=q", "cheese");
selenium.click("name=btnG");
Selenium 2 unfortunately has not been put into Selenium 2 but it shouldn't be too long until it has been added since we are hoping to reach beta in the next couple of months.
As far as I understand, Webdriver implementation started little later than Selenium RC. From my point of view, WebDriver is more flexible solution, which fixed some annoying problems of SeleniumRC.
WebDriver provides standard interface for testing web GUI. There are several implementations of this interface (HTTP, browser-specific and based on Selenium). Since you already have some WebDriver tests, you must be familiar with basic docs like this
The tests are getting longer and longer to complete, so I have been searching for ways to run the tests on a linux server.
Did you try to find actual bottlenecks? I'm not sure, that elimination of WebDriver layer will help. I think, most time is spent on Selenium commands sending and HTTP requests to system-under-test.
If I use sleneium remote control, does
this mean I have to rewrite everything
I wrote with WebDriver API ?
Generally, yes. If you did not implement some additional layer between tests code and WebDriver.
As for Selenium Grid:
You may start several Selenium RC instances on several different [virtual] nodes, then register them in Selenium Grid. Your tests connect to Selenium Grid, and it redirects all commands to SeleniumRC instances, coordinating them in accordance with required browsers.
For details of hudson plugin you may find more info here