Selenium Notes

1. What is Selenium ?

Selenium is an open source web automa on tool.

Limitation of Selenium :

● It doesn’t support windows based applica on directly. However, third party tool (eg: AutoIt) can be
integrated with selenium to automate windows based applica ons.

Note :

1. Selenium community developed specific tool called WINIUM to automate windows based applica ons.
2. Selenium community also developed tools to test mobile applica ons,
● Selendroid - it supports only Android pla orm
● Appium - it supports Android pla orm, MAC, Windows etc.

Note :

All the selenium related resources and documents can be found on the below website.

h p://www.seleniumhq.org

Here, hq stands for head quarter.

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2. Why Selenium is so popular and demanding ?

Selenium is popular and demanding due to the following features.

1. it is an open source tool freely available on internet

2. No project cost involved
3. No licence required
4. Can be easily customized to integrate with other Test Management tools like ALM, Bugzilla etc.
5. It supports almost 13 different so ware languages
● Java
● C#
● Ruby
● Python
● Perl
● Php
● Javascript
● Javascript (Node JS)
● Haskell
● R
● Dart
● TCL
● Objec ve - C
 6. It supports almost all the browsers.(Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer etc) and

hence, cross browser tes ng/compa bility tes ng can be performed using selenium.

7. It supports almost all the Opera ng System (MAC, Windows, LINUX etc) and hence,

cross pla orm tes ng can also be performed.

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3. What are the different flavours of Selenium ?

● Selenium Core (Developed by a company called Thought Works way back in 2004)
● Selenium IDE (supports only Mozilla Firefox - supports record and playback feature)
● Selenium RC (Remote Control - Version is 1.x) (Used for parallel execu on of automa on scripts on
mul ple remote systems)
● Selenium WebDriver (Version is 2.x and 3.x)

Note :

Selenium WebDriver version 3.x is no longer capable of running Selenium RC directly, rather it does through
emula on and via an interface called WebDriverBackedSelenium.

But, it does support Selenium Grid directly.

Selenium Grid :

1. It is one of the component of selenium that is used to run automa on scripts on mul ple system
simultaneously.
2. It is used to carry out compa bility tes ng on mul ple browsers and pla orms.

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4. What are the key/Important topics of Selenium ?

● Automation Framework - guidelines and rules to write selenium code

● GitHub - Central Repository to store code
● Maven - build dependency tool for auto update of selenium version
● Selenium Grid - to test on mul ple OS and browsers
● Jenkins - Con nuous Integra on
● TestNG - framework for genera on of Test Reports and running mul ple test scripts in one go

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5. What are the Softwares required for Selenium ?

 1. Eclipse IDE - Oxygen (Stable version)
2. JDK 1.8
3. Selenium Server-Standalone-3.7.1 (Stable version)

(Download it from the given url : http://www.seleniumhq.org/download)

4. Driver Executables

❖ For Firefox Browser

➢ the name of the driver executable is : geckodriver.exe
➢ Url to download : h ps://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases
➢ Version 0.19 is recommended for firefox browser with version 56.0 (selenium jar - 3.7.1)
❖ For Chrome browser
➢ the name of the driver executable is : chromedriver.exe
➢ Url to download : h ps://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html?path=2.31/
➢ Stable version of chrome version is 62.0 (Use chromedriver.exe with version 2.33)

5. Browsers:

Firefox (Version 57.0)

Chrome (Version 62.0)

Note : To stop auto update of firefox browser version, Make sure to disconnect the internet connec on
and then install 54.0 version, now go to Se ng/Op on in firefox browser and check the below checkbox -
Never check for updates.

6. Application Under Test (AUT)

Application Name : ac TIME

Online url : https://demo.actitime.com/login.do

Offline url : https://localhost:8080/login.do

 To download actiTIME application ,

https://www.actitime.com/download.php

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6. Selenium Architecture - High Level ?

OR

How selenium performs automation testing on browser ?

Client Binding Driver Executables Browser

OR .jar file uses

Language Binding JSON Wire Protocol

1. Since selenium supports multiple languages such as Java, Python, C# etc, we can develop automation
scripts in all the supported languages. This is know as language binding or Client binding.
2. When we execute the selenium code, request goes to the Selenium Standalone Server (also known as
Selenium WebDriver Server), which further process the request based on the input received from the
client binding and perform specific actions on the respective browsers using the browser specific driver
executables,

Eg : geckodriver.exe for firefox browser and

chromedriver.exe for chrome browser and so on…

3. Driver executables uses a protocol called JSON Wire protocol to communicate with related

browsers. (JSON stands for Java Script Object Notation)

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7. Selenium Java Architecture - Detailed Level

 1. SearchContext is the supermost interface present in selenium webdriver.
2. An interface called WebDriver extends SearchContext interface.
3. A total of 13 interfaces are available in selenium, which is implemented by a super most class called
RemoteWebDriver
4. RemoteWebDriver is again extended by few browser specific child classes such as,
● FirefoxDriver class to automate on firefox browser.
● ChromeDriver class to automate on Chrome browser,
● InternetExplorerDriver class to automate on IE and so on…….

NOTE :

All the above men oned interfaces and classes are present in a package called “org.openqa.selenium”.

To view any information about Selenium interfaces, classes and methods, navigate to the below page.

https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/tree/master/java/client/src/org/openqa/selenium

Highlighted below in red is the navigation path.

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8. List down all the methods present in below interfaces of Selenium WebDriver.

Methods of SearchContext interface :

1. findElement()
2. findElements()

Methods of WebDriver interface :

1. close()
2. get()
3. getTitle()
4. getPageSource()
5. getCurrentUrl()
6. getWindowHandle()
7. getWindowHandles()
8. manage()
9. navigate()
10. quit()
11. switchTo()

Methods of TakesScreenshot interface :

 1. getScreenshotAs(args)

Methods of JavascriptExecutor interface :

1. executeScript()
2. executeAsyncScript() - we don’t use this for automation

Methods of WebElement interface :

1. clear()
2. click()
3. getAttribute()
4. getCssValue()
5. getLocation()
6. getRect()
7. getSize()
8. getTagName()
9. getText()
10. isDisplayed()
11. isEnabled()
12. isSelected()
13. sendKeys()
14. submit()

9. Why we upcast the browser related child class to WebDriver, and not RemoteWebDriver class
(RemoteWebDriver being the super most class in selenium) ?

Upcasting Example :

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

● Conver ng a child class object to super type is called Upcas ng.

● In selenium, we use upcas ng so that we can execute the same script on any browser.
● In selenium, we can upcast browser object to RemoteWebDriver, WebDriver, TakesScreenshot ,
JavascriptExecutor etc, but a standard prac ce is to upcast to WebDriver interface.
● This is as per the Selenium coding standard set by the Selenium community. As a tes monial, navigate to
the below selenium community site and check for the text as men oned in the image below.

Url - h p://www.seleniumhq.org/projects/webdriver/
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10. Where did you use Upcasting in Selenium ?

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

Explain the above statement..

1. WebDriver is an interface in Selenium that extends the supermost interface called SearchContext.
2. driver is the upcasted object or WebDriver interface reference variable.
3. “ = ” is an assignment operator.
4. new is a keyword using which object of the FirefoxDriver class is created.
5. FirefoxDriver() is the constructor of FirefoxDriver class which ini alises the object and it will also launch
the firefox browser.

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11. Steps to install/integrate selenium server to the java project

1. Launch eclipse and go to package explorer [naviga on path :- Window menu → Show View → Package
Explorer]
2. Create a java project [File → New→ Java Project]
3. Right click on Java Project and add a new folder with name “driver” [File → New→ Folder]
4. copy geckodriver.exe file from your system and paste it into this driver folder
5. Similarly, create another folder with name “jar”and copy Selenium Standalone Server.jar file into this jar
folder.
6. Expand the jar folder and right click on Selenium Standalone Server.jar file → select Build Path → select
Add to Build Path
7. As soon as you add any .jar files to build path, a new folder will be available called “Reference Libraries”
under the package explorer sec on and you can see the .jar file is added to this “Reference Libraries”
8. To remove the .jar file from the java build path, go to the Reference Libraries → select the .jar file → right
click → select build path → Remove from build path.
9. Other way of adding .jar file to java build path is : right click on the project → build path → configure build
path → Libraries tab → Add External jars → select the .jar file → Apply → ok

12. This program demonstrates Upcasting concept (FirefoxDriver class object to WebDriver interface) and
accessing various methods of WebDriver interface
package qspiders;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;

import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;

public class UpcastingToWebDriver_LaunchBrowser {

public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {

//setting the path of the gecko driver executable

System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", ".\\driver\\geckodriver.exe");

//Launch the firefox browser

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

//Enter the url

driver.get("http://www.google.com");

//Get the title of the google page and print it on the console

String title = driver.getTitle();

System.out.println("the title of the page is :"+ title);

//Get the URL of the google page and print it on the console

String currentUrl = driver.getCurrentUrl();

System.out.println("the URL of the page is :"+ currentUrl);

//Get the source code of the google page and print it on the console

String pageSource = driver.getPageSource();

System.out.println("the source code of the page is :"+ pageSource);

//Halt the program execution for 2 seconds

Thread.sleep(2000);

// Close the browser

driver.close();