How to Open Browser in Incognito / InPrivate mode using Selenium / WebDriver

How to Open Chrome Browser in Incognito mode using Selenium / WebDriver ?

        We will use Chrome Drivers Capabilities & ChromeOptions to open Chrome browser in incognito mode. To be precise, we have to use argument --incognito  for ChromeOption as shown in below example-

How to Open Firefox Browser in Incognito / Private mode using Selenium / WebDriver ?

    We will use Firefox Profile  to open Firefox in private mode. To be precise, we will set browser.private.browsing.autostart in firefox profile preference.

How to Open Internet Explorer (IE) Browser in InPrivate mode using Selenium / WebDriver ?  

    We will use IE Driver Capabilities to open IE in InPrivate mode. To be precise we will use FORCE_CREATE_PROCESS capability along with IE_SWITCHES to which parameter would be -private

This is all for now.
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How to open a new tab in a browser using Selenium WebDriver?

TL;DR:This is a story. If a story does not fascinate you, jump to the solution.

Prologue:-

If you constantly monitor many forums for some reason like LinkedIn groups, Google groups, Stackoverflow for Selenium related queries, you will find a question that has been asked many times with the same answer. Yes, I’m talking about the below question -

How to open a new tab in a browser using Selenium WebDriver?

Or this might have been asked in different style like -

Open new tab instead of a new window using Selenium WebDriver

You will easily find an answer after quick Google search. Why this post? 

           Because I do not agree with the most accepted answer of this question. I am not saying that solution provided is wrong or it won't work, I am just saying that I disagree with the solution provided. What is the solution provided by the way -  Here starts our story.

Open a blank tab in a browser using Selenium WebDriver

And very obvious solution would be use of sendKeys 

           Now the above solution uses shortcut keys provided by the browser to open a new tab. Generally, all browsers use same keys to open a new tab. BUT shortcut keys are OS specific. Being said that solution provided is not platform agnostic. If you want to open the new tab on Macintosh / Mac OS, you have to send  COMMAND+‘t’  together so your code would be like - 

            So if think you have solved the problem straight away using sendKeys, think again. I mostly use windows OS and I estimate my effort based on the amount of time needed to make the code work on windows as selenium is platform agnostic but using such approaches we need to spend additional time on another platform. This is a lesson learned in a hard way. So if you still want to use send keys approach with both OS [which is mostly the case with web application] , your code would look like this-

            This is not very efficient code, every time you want to open a new tab you have to check OS and then you add the complexity of If else to open a new tab.

Solution:-   
            Why not use javascript? All major browsers support javascript. Use javascript to open a new tab in Selenium WebDriver. Simple & elegant solution.

Bonus:- Open URL in a new tab in Selenium WebDriver.

Sometimes you might need to open URL in a new tab which you evaluated after some operation in a browser. All you need is send a parameter to javascript as below.

This is all for now.
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How to uncheck proxy server settings in chrome browser using Selenium WebDriver

If you have read my past post, you might know that I follow a lot of forums to understand what type of issues are faced by the community. This helps me to broaden my knowledge. A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon this question on such forum on Facebook.

Question was-

“How to uncheck proxy server settings in chrome browser using selenium Code ?” with Below image.

Proxy Server Setting for Browser

That was a really interesting question, thanks for this question ‎Roby Chauhan.

Defining problem statement:-

Uncheck proxy setting while invoking Chrome browser using Selenium WebDriver.

Understanding Problem Statement:-

I first tried to solve this question manually and realised once again that proxy setting that you applied in one browser are not just that browser specific but it OS specific.

That means if you set proxy in one browser it is applicable to all browser. If you set the wrong proxy in one browser you would not able to connect to the internet using any browser. Refer image below for more understanding. The image is taken from Chrome support group for education and help.

Order of Precedence for Chrome Policies

So basically we are talking about this red box, where we doing some setting which we need to overcome while invoking chrome using Selenium WebDriver.

Solution:-

After a lot of search on Google, I found a solution somewhere on the internet, we need to use Capabilities & ChromeOptions of chrome. To be specific below option:-

options.addArguments("--no-proxy-server");

Please check working code snippet below:-

This is all for now.

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Highlight Element in Selenium WebDriver

  I missed highlighting object feature of QTP when I used to debug my selenium API call on webelement. Number of times I wondered, why didn't by default any method is provided to perform highlight action. But I no longer wish for same as I have found work around.  

      Remember this - ‘JavaScript comes in handy to perform any fancy tasks on DOM.’

Logic to perform highlight WebElement in Selenium WebDriver:-

       To create highlight effect, as in QTP, we don't just need to highlight the element but also have to de-emphasize/play down the same element. Highlighting element once is not enough, as the operation would be fast and we may don't realise highlighting effect. Better we break down logic as in below steps:-

1. Highlight element using javascript.
2. Play-down same element using javascript.
3. Perform above two actions in a loop for significant time.

Below code demonstrate use of JavascriptExecutor to perform highlight element in Selenium WebDriver.

As you can see in above code, method highlightElement accepts WebElement as parameter and perform highlight operations for 5 seconds [i<5].

This is all for now.

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Object Repository in Selenium/Webdriver

From last 6 month or so, I am happily playing with Selenium API. Earlier, I invested more than 3 years in QTP/UFT. After spending that much of time in QTP, it’s very obvious that moving to selenium is not easy game and you cannot help yourself but compare this two things. You missed a lot of things from QTP when you move to Selenium, I can enlist few of those as follows:-

1. Actions
2. Datatables
3. Checkpoints
4. Smart Identifications
5. Recovery scenarios
6. Readily available test execution results and
7. Object Repository and OR Manager

This is not the complete list but still this are the majors which I have missed.

“Journey becomes easy and better when you have good companion.” I went through many forums to find out good companion for learning selenium and finally settled on a book Selenium Testing Tools Cookbook by Unmesh Gundecha. When I started to learn selenium, I thought of  creating Object Repository in selenium. The book by Unmesh, itself was presented with recipe of implementation of Object Repository [OR]. I have done some changes in implementation as per need which we will discuss in this post.  

What is Object Repository (OR) anyway?

Object Repository is a mechanism to store objects information from application under test for performing action on those objects in a test script, it acts as interface between Test script and application in order to identify the objects during the execution

Setting Up Object Repository for Selenium WebDriver

         We know that, QTP internally uses  XML to store object repository and someone already answered on stackoverflow  to show use of XML as object repository for Webdriver. Personally I prefer to use properties files as they are more readable than XML files. As you might aware that property file uses key-value pair format. You must decide the format for your properties file, I am using it in following way:-

[logical_name]=[locator_type]~[locator_value]

Where -

[logical_name]:Logical Name generally would be label of element.[As it displayed on the UI]

[locator_type]:Locator type must be one from the following-id, name, className,  linkText, partialLinkText, cssSelector, xpath, tagName.

[locator_value]:Locator value - Value of locator_type

Sample property file screenshot-

Sample Object Repository Selenium WebDriver

Fetching objects from the Object Repository:- Now that we have created properties file (OR), we need to have mechanism in a place to fetch this objects in our test script. Let's design a class which will help us to achieve following objectives.:-

1. Get WebElement as mentioned in our properties file.[method getElement()]
2. Get Locator as mentioned in our properties file. [method getLocator()]

Using Object Repository in Selenium WebDriver script:-

Now let us try to automate the scenario of login to application which uses Login OR  [Login.properties file as shown in image], ObjectMap class.

Above script demonstrate login to wordpress. It uses getLocator method from the class ObjectMap. This is very straightforward example of OR, it does not uses Page Object Model or TestNG. If you notice, we have not used getElement method from the ObjectMap class and used one OR in a script like shared OR. May be in future, I will post related articles which will show use of OR as Local OR along with Page Object.

This is all for now.

Cheers!!

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Block Push Notification on Chrome in Selenium Webdriver

Many of you might already know that Chrome browser supports push notification  almost on all platforms from version 42  and many sites including Facebook and Google+ have already started delivering push notification for end users. So when it comes to automating such sites/apps first thing that you notice is browser asking permission to deliver push notification.

Facebook asking for permission to show push notification

Problem Statement:-

As you can observe in above image that it would be impossible to perform immediate next action in browser after login as it’s been blacked-out. Chrome driver will wait for sometime (implicit wait) and then try to perform next step in browser, whatever it may be, it will fail and if you missed the step in execution which might cause failure of next step and result would be failed test/test suite.

Also push notification badges are not getting displayed as part of web document, so clicking on those button displayed is not possible through selenium.

Workaround:-

    Simple thing to do, is find body element of page [which exist for all the pages :-) ], and perform double click on it. But as mentioned, it would be just workaround.

Better Approach:-

    What you would have done if you have to do same thing again and again manually in this case? Consider testing ten different app and login scenarios for them. Any sane person would have searched for how to do the same manually.

Manually disable/block Push Notification in Chrome

Whatever you would have done manually, would it be possible to set this up while invoking chromedriver instance? Yes, This is where chromedriver Capabilities and ChromeOptions comes into the picture.

Almost for each user customizable setting there is ChromeOption available. You can check all options here. Now to prevent or block push notifications on Chrome we can use disable-notifications option.

This is all for now.
Cheers!!

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Selenium as a Windows Service

I have been playing with selenium grid from past few days and it becomes very tedious to me to setup the grid by firing commands in command prompt [I am mostly windows 7 user]. So I thought of running selenium grid as service and for that I have used NSSM - the Non-Sucking Service Manager.

To set up grid as service, obviously you need-

1. Selenium-server-standalone-2.53.0.jar file (should work with other version but I have used this)
2. NSSM

Selenium Grid Hub setup:-

    You need to have following files in folder ready to use before you start with this setup. My folder setup is like-

    To set up hub, we use following command in the command prompt.

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.53.0.jar -role hub

Check whether grid hub is up and running as shown in below image-

Now if you accidentally close your command prompt running, your hub will go down which used happen a lot to me as I was not very keen user of command prompt. By setting up this as service, anyone can get rid of orphan looking command prompt. Now close the command prompt and start with actaul setup of service.

Set up same selenium grid hub as service

NSSM

Detail use of every tab in NSSM is mentioned here. Verify that proper entries are made in the registry for same.

You can monitor SeleniumHub service running now in Services.

Here is your selenium grid hub working as service.

On Grid adding chrome-driver node -

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.53.0.jar -role node -hub http://192.168.0.174:4444/grid/register/ -browser browserName="chrome",version=ANY,platform=WINDOWS,maxInstances=1 -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=C:\Grid\chromedriver.exe  

Execute above command in command prompt. You need to use your hub IP instead of 192.168.0.174 which is IP of my hub. 

Observe your selenium grid console now, you can see one chrome node is added over there.

Set up same chrome node as service:-

Close the previously running chrome node in command prompt. I’m passing below command as parameter while creating new service as ‘ChromeNode’ -

-jar selenium-server-standalone-2.53.0.jar -role node -hub http://192.168.0.174:4444/grid/register/ -browser browserName="chrome",version=ANY,platform=WINDOWS,maxInstances=1 -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=C:\Grid\chromedriver.exe

 You need to use your hub IP instead of 192.168.0.174 which is IP of my hub. 

Verify that proper entries are made in the registry for same.

You can monitor ChromeNode service running now in Services.

Here is your whole selenium grid setup running as service.

This is all for now in selenium testing tools

Cheers!!

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