frameworkium

Native Controls

Alerts/Dialog boxes

This test demonstrates the use of the switchTo().alert() functionality that selenium uses to interact with javascript alert popups. The page object here contains the methods that accept, dismiss, cancel, ok, and enter text to a variety of different native JS popups. These are summarised below:

// To accept an alert (e.g. click 'yes' or 'accept' or 'ok'
driver.switchTo().alert().accept();

// To dismiss or cancel an alert (e.g. click 'no' or 'dismiss' or 'cancel')
driver.switchTo().alert().dismiss();

// To enter text on an alert requiring text entry
driver.switchTo().alert().sendKeys(textToEnter);

// To enter authentication on an alert requiring a username & password
Credentials credentials = new UsernamePasswordCredentials("username", "password");
driver.switchTo().alert().authenticationWith(credentials);

Handling file pickers - e.g. ‘Choose Files’ button

In order to upload a file to a site, the ‘choose files’ input control is used. To a user, this will open a file browser on whatever platform they’re on. Selenium cannot interact with this native control.

In order to get around this, we can SendKeys(/path/to/file) directly on the input control - e.g. chooseFilesInputButton.sendKeys("/path/to/file");, which bypasses the file browser that selenium cannot handle.

The example below demonstrates how to perform this on the Heroku File Upload page. The full example page object can be seen here and the test that uses this here

@Visible
@Name("Choose Files button")
@FindBy(css = "input#file-upload")
private WebElement chooseFilesButton;

@Visible
@Name("Upload button")
@FindBy(css = "input#file-submit")
private WebElement uploadButton;

@Step("Upload a file by choosing file and then clicking upload")
public FileUploadSuccessPage uploadFile(File filename) {
  chooseFilesButton.sendKeys(filename.getAbsolutePath());
  uploadButton.click();
  return PageFactory.newInstance(FileUploadSuccessPage.class);
}

Why not use AutoIt, Sikuli etc.

Running locally, on your machine, with your config etc., a number of solutions may work perfectly well. However, the main problems come when you want to ramp things up - what about:

• running tests in parallel?
• other browsers - does it behave the same?
• other OSs - mac dialogs are very different to windows etc.
• on a grid - more dependencies required (e.g. AutoIt must be present on all your grid nodes)
• reliability

We want to try and keep our test pack as scalable and multi-platform as possible - although we’re bypassing the OS’s file browser by sending keys directly to the input control here. It’s important to remember our main focus is testing our application - not the browser’s file picker functionality.