1. Selenium Webdriver Commands For Python
  2. Installing Selenium Webdriver For Python
  3. Python Selenium Webdriver Commands
  4. Selenium Webdriver Wait For Element Python
  5. Python Selenium Webdriver Documentation
  6. Selenium Python Webdriver Chrome
  7. Selenium Webdriver Python Documentation
  8. Selenium Python Driver

Selenium WebDriver

The biggest change in Selenium recently has been the inclusion of the WebDriver API. Driving a browser natively as a user would either locally or on a remote machine using the Selenium Server it marks a leap forward in terms of browser automation.

Selenium WebDriver fits in the same role as RC did, and has incorporated the original 1.x bindings. It refers to both the language bindings and the implementations of the individual browser controlling code. This is commonly referred to as just 'WebDriver' or sometimes as Selenium 2.

File download is nothing new and we often have to download files while executing automation tests. Python Selenium WebDriver is excellent in manipulating browser commands however lacks features to handle operating system native windows like automating file downloads. Selenium WebDriver With Python – Usage & Examples. Now that you have the setup ready, you can now use Selenium WebDriver Python Bindings for testing of your web application. Below is a simple piece of code which I used for python automation testing, it will work with the ‘search functionality’ in Google. Microsoft WebDriver. Close the loop on your developer cycle by automating testing of your website in Microsoft Edge with Microsoft WebDriver. Run tests locally for free in the cloud using BrowserStack, a leader in automated testing.

Selenium 1.0 + WebDriver = Selenium 2.0
  • 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

WebDriver is the name of the key interface against which tests should be written in Java, the implementing classes one should use are listed as below:

ChromeDriver,EventFiringWebDriver,FirefoxDriver,HtmlUnitDriver,InternetExplorerDriver,PhantomJSDriver,RemoteWebDriver,SafariDriver

For More information on Selenium WebDriver, please see the documentation and Remote Control to WebDriver Migration Notes.

NOTE: We’re currently working on documenting these sections.We believe the information here is accurate, however be aware we are also still working on thischapter. Additional information will be provided as we go which should make this chapter moresolid.

Introducing WebDriver¶

The primary new feature in Selenium 2.0 is the integration of the WebDriver API.WebDriver is designed to provide a simpler, more concise programming interface in addition toaddressing some limitations in the Selenium-RC API. Selenium-WebDriver was developedto better support dynamic web pages where elements of a page may change without the pageitself being reloaded. WebDriver’s goal is to supply a well-designed object-orientedAPI that provides improved support for modern advanced web-app testing problems.

How Does WebDriver ‘Drive’ the Browser Compared to Selenium-RC?¶

Selenium-WebDriver makes direct calls to the browser using each browser’s native support for automation.How these direct calls are made, and the features they support depends on the browser you are using.Information on each ‘browser driver’ is provided later in this chapter.

For those familiar with Selenium-RC, this is quite different from what you are used to. Selenium-RCworked the same way for each supported browser. It ‘injected’ javascript functions into the browserwhen the browser was loaded and then used its javascript to drive the AUT within the browser.WebDriver does not use this technique. Again, it drives the browser directly using the browser’sbuilt in support for automation.

WebDriver and the Selenium-Server¶

You may, or may not, need the Selenium Server, depending on how you intend to use Selenium-WebDriver.If your browser and tests will all run on the same machine, and your tests only use the WebDriver API,then you do not need to run the Selenium-Server; WebDriver will run the browser directly.

Selenium Webdriver Commands For Python

There are some reasons though to use the Selenium-Server with Selenium-WebDriver.

  • You are using Selenium-Grid to distribute your tests over multiple machines or virtual machines (VMs).
  • You want to connect to a remote machine that has a particular browser version that is not onyour current machine.
  • You are not using the Java bindings (i.e. Python, C#, or Ruby) and would like to use HtmlUnit Driver

Setting Up a Selenium-WebDriver Project¶

To install Selenium means to set up a project in a development so you can write a program usingSelenium. How you do this depends on your programming language and your development environment.

Java¶

The easiest way to set up a Selenium 2.0 Java project is to use Maven. Maven will download thejava bindings (the Selenium 2.0 java client library) and all its dependencies, and will create theproject for you, using a maven pom.xml (project configuration) file. Once you’ve done this, youcan import the maven project into your preferred IDE, IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse.

First, create a folder to contain your Selenium project files. Then, to use Maven, you need apom.xml file. This can be created with a text editor. We won’t teach thedetails of pom.xml files or for using Maven since there are already excellent references on this.Your pom.xml file will look something like this. Create this file in the folder you created foryour project.

Be sure you specify the most current version. At the time of writing, the version listed above wasthe most current, however there were frequent releases immediately after the release of Selenium 2.0.Check the Maven download page for the current release and edit the above dependency accordingly.

Now, from a command-line, CD into the project directory and run maven as follows.

This will download Selenium and all its dependencies and will add them to the project.

Finally, import the project into your preferred development environment. For those not familiarwith this, we’ve provided an appendix which shows this.

Importing a maven project into IntelliJ IDEA.Importing a maven project into Eclipse.

C#¶

As of Selenium 2.2.0, the C# bindings are distributed as a set of signed dlls along with otherdependency dlls. Prior to 2.2.0, all Selenium dll’s were unsigned.To include Selenium in your project, simply download the latestselenium-dotnet zip file from http://selenium-release.storage.googleapis.com/index.html.If you are using Windows Vista or above, you should unblock the zip file beforeunzipping it: Right click on the zip file, click “Properties”, click “Unblock”and click “OK”.

Unzip the contents of the zip file, and add a reference to each of the unzippeddlls to your project in Visual Studio (or your IDE of choice).

Official NuGet Packages:RCWebDriverWebDriverBackedSeleniumSupport

Python¶

If you are using Python for test automation then you probably are already familiar with developingin Python. To add Selenium to your Python environment run the following command froma command-line.

Pip requires pip to be installed, pip also has a dependencyon setuptools.

Teaching Python development itself is beyond the scope of this document, however there are manyresources on Python and likely developers in your organization can help you get up to speed.

Ruby¶

If you are using Ruby for test automation then you probably are already familiar with developingin Ruby. To add Selenium to your Ruby environment run the following command froma command-line.

Teaching Ruby development itself is beyond the scope of this document, however there are manyresources on Ruby and likely developers in your organization can help you get up to speed.

Perl¶

Perl bindings are provided by a third party, please refer to any of their documentation on how toinstall / get started. There is one known Perl binding as of this writing.

PHP¶

PHP bindings are provided by a third party, please refer to any of their documentation on how toinstall / get started. There are three known bindings at this time: By ChibimagicBy Lukasz Kolczynski and By the Facebook

JavaScript¶

If you are using node.js to develop your application, the selenium project provides Javascript bindings on npm.

Install the Javascript bindings with npm:

You can find the API docs here.

Migrating from Selenium 1.0¶

For those who already have test suites written using Selenium 1.0, we have provided tips on how tomigrate your existing code to Selenium 2.0. Simon Stewart, the lead developer for Selenium 2.0,has written an article on migrating from Selenium 1.0. We’ve included this as an appendix.

Introducing the Selenium-WebDriver API by Example¶

WebDriver is a tool for automating web application testing, and in particularto verify that they work as expected. It aims to provide a friendly API that’seasy to explore and understand, easier to use than the Selenium-RC (1.0) API,which will help to make your tests easier toread and maintain. It’s not tied to any particular test framework, so it canbe used equally well in a unit testing project or from a plain old “main” method.This section introduces WebDriver’s API and helps get you started becomingfamiliar with it. Start by setting up a WebDriver project if you haven’t already.This was described in the previous section, Setting Up a Selenium-WebDriver Project.

Once your project is set up, you can see that WebDriver acts just as any normal library:it is entirely self-contained, and you usually don’t need to remember to start anyadditional processes or run any installers before using it, as opposed to the proxy serverwith Selenium-RC.

Note: additional steps are required to use ChromeDriver, Opera Driver, Android Driverand iOS Driver

You’re now ready to write some code. An easy way to get started is thisexample, which searches for the term “Cheese” on Google and then outputs theresult page’s title to the console.

In upcoming sections, you will learn more about how to use WebDriver for thingssuch as navigating forward and backward in your browser’s history, and how totest web sites that use frames and windows. We also provide a morethorough discussions and examples.

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”:

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 exposes a “Find Element” and “Find Elements” method. The former returnsa WebElement object matching the query, and throws an exception if such an element cannot be found.The latter returns a list of WebElements, possibly empty 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:

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:

By Tag Name¶

The DOM Tag Name of the element.

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

By Name¶

Find the input element with matching name attribute.

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

By Link Text¶

Find the link element with matching visible text.

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

By Partial Link Text¶

Find the link element with partial matching visible text. What is logic pdf.

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

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 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:

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.

Selenium Webdriver For Python
DriverTag and Attribute NameAttribute ValuesNative XPath Support
HtmlUnit DriverLower-casedAs they appear in the HTMLYes
Internet Explorer DriverLower-casedAs they appear in the HTMLNo
Firefox DriverCase insensitiveAs they appear in the HTMLYes

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

The following number of matches will be found

XPath expressionHtmlUnit DriverFirefox DriverInternet Explorer Driver
//input1 (“example”)22
//INPUT020

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:

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

Getting text values¶

People often wish to retrieve the innerText value contained within an element. This returns a single string value. Note that this will only return the visible text displayed on the page.

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:

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.

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:

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:

Installing Selenium Webdriver For Python

Selenium Webdriver For Python

Moving Between Windows and Frames¶

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

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:

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:

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

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:

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¶

Python Selenium Webdriver Commands

Earlier, we covered navigating to a page using the “get” command (driver.get('http://www.example.com') or driver.Url='http://www.example.com' in C#).As you’ve seen, WebDriver has a number 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:

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:

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,e.g. http://example.com/some404page).

Changing the User Agent¶

This is easy with the Firefox Driver:

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.

Driver Specifics and Tradeoffs¶

Selenium-WebDriver’s Drivers¶

WebDriver is the name of the key interface against which tests should bewritten, but there are several implementations. These include:

HtmlUnit Driver¶

This is currently the fastest and most lightweight implementation of WebDriver.As the name suggests, this is based on HtmlUnit. HtmlUnit is a java based implementationof a WebBrowser without a GUI. For any language binding (other than java) theSelenium Server is required to use this driver.

Usage¶

Pros¶

  • Fastest implementation of WebDriver
  • A pure Java solution and so it is platform independent.
  • Supports JavaScript

Cons¶

  • Emulates other browsers’ JavaScript behaviour (see below)

JavaScript in the HtmlUnit Driver¶

None of the popular browsers uses the JavaScript engine used by HtmlUnit(Rhino). If you test JavaScript using HtmlUnit the results may differsignificantly from those browsers.

When we say “JavaScript” we actually mean “JavaScript and the DOM”. Althoughthe DOM is defined by the W3C each browser has its own quirks and differencesin their implementation of the DOM and in how JavaScript interacts with it.HtmlUnit has an impressively complete implementation of the DOM and has goodsupport for using JavaScript, but it is no different from any otherbrowser: it has its own quirks and differences from both the W3C standard andthe DOM implementations of the major browsers, despite its ability to mimicother browsers.

With WebDriver, we had to make a choice; do we enable HtmlUnit’s JavaScriptcapabilities and run the risk of teams running into problems that only manifestthemselves there, or do we leave JavaScript disabled, knowing that there aremore and more sites that rely on JavaScript? We took the conservative approach,and by default have disabled support when we use HtmlUnit. With each release ofboth WebDriver and HtmlUnit, we reassess this decision: we hope to enableJavaScript by default on the HtmlUnit at some point.

Enabling JavaScript¶

Selenium Webdriver Wait For Element Python

If you can’t wait, enabling JavaScript support is very easy:

This will cause the HtmlUnit Driver to emulate Firefox 3.6’s JavaScripthandling by default.

Firefox Driver¶

Controls the Firefox browser using a Firefox plugin.The Firefox Profile that is used is stripped down from what is installed on themachine to only include the Selenium WebDriver.xpi (plugin). A few settings arealso changed by default (see the source to see which ones)Firefox Driver is capable of being run and is tested on Windows, Mac, Linux.Currently on versions 3.6, 10, latest - 1, latest

Usage¶

Pros¶

  • Runs in a real browser and supports JavaScript
  • Faster than the Internet Explorer Driver

Modifying the Firefox Profile¶

Suppose that you wanted to modify the user agent string (as above), but you’vegot a tricked out Firefox profile that contains dozens of useful extensions.There are two ways to obtain this profile. Assuming that the profile has beencreated using Firefox’s profile manager (firefox-ProfileManager):

Alternatively, if the profile isn’t already registered with Firefox:

As we develop features in the Firefox Driver, we expose the ability to use them.For example, until we feel native events are stable on Firefox for Linux, theyare disabled by default. To enable them:

Virtual dj 7.4.1 free download. Windows 7 Download periodically updates pricing and information of VirtualDJ PRO free download from the publisher,but some information may be out-of-date.Using cracks, warez serial numbers, registration codes or keygens forVirtualDJ PRO license key is illegal.

Info¶

See the Firefox section in the wiki page for the most up to date info.

Internet Explorer Driver¶

The InternetExplorerDriver is a standalone server which implements WebDriver’s wire protocol. This driver has been tested with IE 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 on appropriate combinations of Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1. As of 15 April 2014, IE 6 is no longer supported.

The driver supports running 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the browser. The choice of how to determine which “bit-ness” to use in launching the browser depends on which version of the IEDriverServer.exe is launched. If the 32-bit version of IEDriverServer.exe is launched, the 32-bit version of IE will be launched. Similarly, if the 64-bit version of IEDriverServer.exe is launched, the 64-bit version of IE will be launched.

Usage¶

Pros¶

  • Runs in a real browser and supports Javascript

Cons¶

  • Obviously the InternetExplorerDriver will only work on Windows!
  • Comparatively slow (though still pretty snappy!)

Info¶

See the Internet Explorer section of the wiki page for the most up to date info.Please take special note of the Required Configuration section.

ChromeDriver¶

ChromeDriver is maintained / supported by the Chromiumproject iteslf. WebDriver works with Chrome through the chromedriver binary (found on the chromiumproject’s download page). You need to have both chromedriver and a version of chrome browser installed.chromedriver needs to be placed somewhere on your system’s path in order for WebDriver to automaticallydiscover it. The Chrome browser itself is discovered by chromedriver in the default installation path.These both can be overridden by environment variables. Please refer to the wikifor more information.

Usage¶

Pros¶

  • Runs in a real browser and supports JavaScript
  • Because Chrome is a Webkit-based browser, the ChromeDriver may allow you toverify that your site works in Safari. Note that since Chrome uses its own V8JavaScript engine rather than Safari’s Nitro engine, JavaScript execution maydiffer.

Info¶

See our wiki for the most up to date info.More info can also be found on the downloads page

Getting running with ChromeDriver¶

Download the ChromeDriver executableand follow the other instructions on thewiki page

Opera Driver¶

See the Opera Driver wiki article in theSelenium Wiki for information on using the Opera Driver.

iOS Driver¶

See either the ios-driver or appium projects.

Alternative Back-Ends: Mixing WebDriver and RC Technologies¶

WebDriver-Backed Selenium-RC¶

The Java version of WebDriver provides an implementation of the Selenium-RC API. These means thatyou can use the underlying WebDriver technology using the Selenium-RC API. This is primarilyprovided for backwards compatibility. It allows those who have existing test suites using theSelenium-RC API to use WebDriver under the covers. It’s provided to help ease the migration pathto Selenium-WebDriver. Also, this allows one to use both APIs, side-by-side, in the same test code.

Selenium-WebDriver is used like this:

Pros¶

  • Allows for the WebDriver and Selenium APIs to live side-by-side
  • Provides a simple mechanism for a managed migration from the Selenium RC APIto WebDriver’s
  • Does not require the standalone Selenium RC server to be run

Cons¶

  • Does not implement every method
  • More advanced Selenium usage (using “browserbot” or other built-in JavaScriptmethods from Selenium Core) may not work
  • Some methods may be slower due to underlying implementation differences

Backing WebDriver with Selenium¶

WebDriver doesn’t support as many browsers as Selenium RC does, so in order toprovide that support while still using the WebDriver API, you can make use ofthe SeleneseCommandExecutor

Safari is supported in this way with the following code (be sure to disablepop-up blocking):

Python Selenium Webdriver Documentation

There are currently some major limitations with this approach, notably thatfindElements doesn’t work as expected. Also, because we’re using Selenium Corefor the heavy lifting of driving the browser, you are limited by the JavaScriptsandbox.

Running Standalone Selenium Server for use with RemoteDrivers¶

From Selenium’s Download page download selenium-server-standalone-<version>.jar and optionally IEDriverServer. If you plan to work with Chrome, download it from Google Code.

Unpack IEDriverServer and/or chromedriver and put them in a directory which is on the $PATH / %PATH% - the Selenium Server should then be able to handle requests for IE / Chrome without additional modifications.

Selenium Python Webdriver Chrome

Start the server on the command line with

If you want to use native events functionality, indicate this on the command line with the option

For other command line options, execute

In order to function properly, the following ports should be allowed incoming TCP connections: 4444, 7054-5 (or twice as many ports as the number of concurrent instances you plan to run). Under Windows, you may need to unblock the applications as well.

Additional Resources¶

You can find further resources for WebDriverin WebDriver’s wiki

Of course, don’t hesitate to do an internet search on any Selenium topic, includingSelenium-WebDriver’s drivers. There are quite a few blogs on Selenium along with numerous postson various user forums. Additionally the Selenium User’s Group is a great resource.http://groups.google.com/group/selenium-users

Selenium Webdriver Python Documentation

Next Steps¶

Selenium Python Driver

This chapter has simply been a high level walkthrough of WebDriver and some of its keycapabilities. Once getting familiar with the Selenium-WebDriver API you will then want to learnhow to build test suites for maintainability, extensibility, and reduced fragility when features ofthe AUT frequently change. The approach most Selenium experts are now recommending is to designyour test code using the Page Object Design Pattern along with possibly a Page Factory.Selenium-WebDriver provides support for this by supplying a PageFactory class in Java and C#.This is presented, along with other advanced topics, in thenext chapter. Also, for high-level description of thistechnique, you may want to look at theTest Design Considerations chapter. Both of thesechapters present techniques for writing more maintainable tests by making your test code moremodular.