Selenium 2.0 and WebDriver

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 this chapter. Additional information will be provided as we go which should make this chapter more solid. In addition, we will be proofreading and reviewing it.

Selenium 2.0 Features

Selenium 2.0 has many new exciting features and improvements over Selenium 1. These new features are introduced release in the release announcement in the Official Selenium Blog.

The primary new feature is the integration of the WebDriver API. This addresses a number of limitations along with providing an alternative, and simpler, programming interface. The goal is to develop an object-oriented API that provides additional support for a larger number of browsers along with improved support for modern advanced web-app testing problems.

NOTE: We will add a description of SEL 2.0 new features–for now we refer readers to the release announcement.

The Selenium Server – When to Use It

You may, or may not, need the Selenium Server, depending on how you intend to use Selenium. If you will be strictly using the WebDriver API you do not need the Selenium Server. The Selenium Server provides Selenium-RC functionality, which is primarily used for Selenium 1.0 backwards compatability. Since WebDriver uses completely different technology to interact with the browsers, the Selenium Server is not needed. Selenium-WebDriver makes direct calls to the browser using each browser’s native support for automation. Selenium-RC however requires the Selenium- Server to inject javascript into the browser and to then translate messages from your test program’s language-specific Selenium client library into commands that invoke the javascript commands which in turn, automate the AUT from within the browser. In short, if you’re using Selenium-WebDriver, you don’t need the Selenium-Server.

Another reason for using the Selenium-Server is if you are using Selenium-Grid for distributed exectution of your tests. Finally, if you are using Selenium-backed Web-Driver (the WebDriver API but with back-end Selenium technology) you will also need the Selenium Server. These topics are described in more detail later in this chapter.

Setting Up a Selenium-WebDriver Project

To install Selenium means to set up a project in a development so you can write a program using Selenium. 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 the java bindings (the Selenium 2.0 java client library) and all its dependencies, and will create the project for you, using a maven pom.xml (project configuration) file. Once you’ve done this, you can 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 a pom.xml file. This can be created with a text editor. We won’t teach the details 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 for your project.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
                 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
                 xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
        <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
        <groupId>MySel20Proj</groupId>
        <artifactId>MySel20Proj</artifactId>
        <version>1.0</version>
        <dependencies>
            <dependency>
                <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
                <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
                <version>2.5.0</version>
            </dependency>
        </dependencies>
</project>

The key component adding Selenium and its dependencies are the lines

<dependency>
        <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
        <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
        <version>2.5.0</version>
</dependency>

Be sure you specify the most current version. At the time of writing, the version listed above was the most current, however there were frequent releases immediately after the releast of Selenium 2.0. Check the SeleniumHq website 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.

mvn clean install

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 familiar with this, we’ve provided an appendix which shows this.

Importing a maven project into IntelliJ IDEA.

C#

As of Selenium 2.2.0 is distributed as a set of signed dlls and all other dependency dlls. Prior to 2.2.0, all Selenium dll’s were unsigned. To include Selenium in your project, simply download the latest selenium-dotnet zip file fromhttps://code.google.com/p/selenium/downloads/list. If you are using Windows Vista or above, you should unblock the zip file before unzipping 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 unzipped dlls to your project in Visual Studio (or your IDE of choice).

Note that we do not have an official NuGet package at this time.

Python

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

pip install selenium

Teaching Python development itself is beyond the scope of this document, however there are many resources 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 developing in Ruby. To add Selenium to your Ruby environment run the following command from a command-line.

gem install selenium-webdriver

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

Perl

Perl is not supported in Selenium 2.0 at this time. If you have questions, or would like to assist providing this support, please post a note to the Selenium developers.

PHP

PHP is not supported in Selenium 2.0 at this time. If you have questions, or would like to assist providing this support, please post a note to the Selenium developers.

Migrating from Selenium 1.0

For those who already have test suites writting using Selenium 1.0, we have provided tips on how to migrate 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.

Migrating From Selenium RC to Selenium WebDriver

Getting Started With Selenium-WebDriver

WebDriver is a tool for automating testing web applications, and in particular to verify that they work as expected. It aims to provide a friendly API that’s easy to explore and understand, easier to use than the Selenium-RC (1.0) API, which will help make your tests easier to read and maintain. It’s not tied to any particular test framework, so it can be used equally well in a unit testing or from a plain old “main” method. This section introduces WebDriver’s API and helps get you started becoming familiar 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 any additional processes or run any installers before using it, as opposed to the proxy server with Selenium-RC.

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

package org.openqa.selenium.example;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.ExpectedCondition;
import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.WebDriverWait;

public class Selenium2Example  {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Create a new instance of the Firefox driver
        // Notice that the remainder of the code relies on the interface, 
        // not the implementation.
        WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

        // And now use this to visit Google
        driver.get("http://www.google.com");
        // Alternatively the same thing can be done like this
        // driver.navigate().to("http://www.google.com");

        // Find the text input element by its name
        WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.name("q"));

        // Enter something to search for
        element.sendKeys("Cheese!");

        // Now submit the form. WebDriver will find the form for us from the element
        element.submit();

        // Check the title of the page
        System.out.println("Page title is: " + driver.getTitle());
        
        // Google's search is rendered dynamically with JavaScript.
        // Wait for the page to load, timeout after 10 seconds
        (new WebDriverWait(driver, 10)).until(new ExpectedCondition<Boolean>() {
            public Boolean apply(WebDriver d) {
                return d.getTitle().toLowerCase().startsWith("cheese!");
            }
        });

        // Should see: "cheese! - Google Search"
        System.out.println("Page title is: " + driver.getTitle());
        
        //Close the browser
        driver.quit();
    }
}

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

Introducing WebDriver’s Drivers

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

Name of driver Available on which OS? Class to instantiate

HtmlUnit Driver	All	org.openqa.selenium.htmlunit.HtmlUnitDriver
Firefox Driver	All	org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver
Internet Explorer Driver	Windows	org.openqa.selenium.ie.InternetExplorerDriver
Chrome Driver	All	org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver
Opera Driver		We’re currently upating this table
iPhone Driver
Android Driver

You can find out more information about each of these by following the links in the table. Which you use depends on what you want to do. For sheer speed, the HtmlUnit Driver is great, but it’s not graphical, which means that you can’t watch what’s happening. As a developer you may be comfortable with this, but sometimes it’s good to be able to test using a real browser, especially when you’re showing a demo of your application (or running the tests) for an audience. Often, this idea is referred to as “safety”, and it falls into two parts. Firstly, there’s “actual safety”, which refers to whether or not the tests work as they should. This can be measured and quantified. Secondly, there’s “perceived safety”, which refers to whether or not an observer believes the tests work as they should. This varies from person to person, and will depend on their familiarity with the application under test, WebDriver, and your testing framework.

To support higher “perceived safety”, you may wish to choose a driver such as the Firefox Driver. This has the added advantage that this driver actually renders content to a screen, and so can be used to detect information such as the position of an element on a page, or the CSS properties that apply to it. However, this additional flexibility comes at the cost of slower overall speed. By writing your tests against the WebDriver interface, it is possible to pick the most appropriate driver for a given test.

To keep things simple, let’s start with the HtmlUnit Driver:

WebDriver driver = new HtmlUnitDriver();

Commands and Operation

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”:

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

WebDriver will wait until the page has fully loaded (that is, the “onload” event has fired) before returning control to your test or script. It’s worth noting that if your page uses a lot of AJAX on load then WebDriver may not know when it has completely loaded. If you need to ensure such pages are fully loaded then you can use an Explicit and Implicit Waits.

Interacting With the Page

Just being able to go to places isn’t terribly useful. What we’d really like to do is to interact with the pages, or, more specifically, the HTML elements within a page. First of all, we need to find one. WebDriver offers a number of ways of finding elements. For example, given an element defined as:

<input type="text" name="passwd" id="passwd-id" />

you could find it using any of the following examples:

WebElement element;
element = driver.findElement(By.id("passwd-id"));
element = driver.findElement(By.name("passwd"));
element = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[@id='passwd-id']"));

You can also look for a link by its text, but be careful! The text must be an exact match! You should also be careful when using XPATH in WebDriver. If there’s more than one element that matches the query, then only the first will be returned. If nothing can be found, aNoSuchElementException will be thrown.

WebDriver has an “Object-based” API; we represent all types of elements using the same interface: Web Element. This means that although you may see a lot of possible methods you could invoke when you hit your IDE’s auto-complete key combination, not all of them will make sense or be valid. Don’t worry! WebDriver will attempt to do the Right Thing, and if you call a method that makes no sense (“setSelected()” on a “meta” tag, for example) an exception will be thrown.

So, you’ve got an element. What can you do with it? First of all, you may want to enter some text into a text field:

element.sendKeys("some text");

You can simulate pressing the arrow keys by using the “Keys” class:

element.sendKeys(" and some", Keys.ARROW_DOWN);

It is possible to call sendKeys on any element, which makes it possible to test keyboard shortcuts such as those used on GMail. A side-effect of this is that typing something into a text field won’t automatically clear it. Instead, what you type will be appended to what’s already there. You can easily clear the contents of a text field or textarea:

element.clear();

Locating UI Elements (WebElements)

Note: This section still needs to be developed.

Locating elements in WebDriver is done using the “By” class. This class implements all location strategies used by WebDriver.

Using XPATH Statements

At a high level, WebDriver uses a browser’s native XPath capabilities wherever possible. On those browsers that don’t have native XPath support, we have provided our own implementation. This can lead to some unexpected behaviour unless you are aware of the differences in the various xpath engines.

Driver Tag and Attribute Name Attribute Values Native XPath Support

HtmlUnit Driver	Lower-cased	As they appear in the HTML	Yes
Internet Explorer Driver	Lower-cased	As they appear in the HTML	No
Firefox Driver	Case insensitive	As they appear in the HTML	Yes

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

<input type="text" name="example" />
<INPUT type="text" name="other" />

The following number of matches will be found

XPath expression HtmlUnit DriverFirefox DriverInternet Explorer Driver

//input	1 (“example”)	2	2
//INPUT	0	2	0

Sometimes HTML elements do not need attributes to be explicitly declared because they will default to known values. For example, the “input” tag does not require the “type” attribute because it defaults to “text”. The rule of thumb when using xpath in WebDriver is that you should not expect to be able to match against these implicit attributes.

User Input - Filling In Forms

We’ve already seen how to enter text into a textarea or text field, but what about the other elements? You can “toggle” the state of checkboxes, and you can use “click” to set something like an OPTION tag selected. Dealing with SELECT tags isn’t too bad:

WebElement select = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//select"));
List<WebElement> allOptions = select.findElements(By.tagName("option"));
for (WebElement option : allOptions) {
    System.out.println(String.format("Value is: %s", option.getAttribute("value")));
    option.click();
}

This will find the first “SELECT” element on the page, and cycle through each of 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 SELECT elements. WebDriver’s support classes include one called “Select”, which provides useful methods for interacting with these.

Select select = new Select(driver.findElement(By.xpath("//select")));
select.deselectAll();
select.selectByVisibleText("Edam");

This will deselect all OPTIONs from the first SELECT on the page, and then select the OPTION with the displayed text of “Edam”.

Once you’ve finished filling out the form, you probably want to submit it. One way to do this would be to find the “submit” button and click it:

driver.findElement(By.id("submit")).click();
// Assume the button has the ID "submit" :)

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 DOM until it finds the enclosing form and then calls submit on that. If the element isn’t in a form, then theNoSuchElementException will be thrown:

element.submit();

Moving Between Windows and Frames

Some web applications have any frames or multiple windows. WebDriver supports moving between named windows using the “switchTo” method:

driver.switchTo().window("windowName");

All calls to driver will now be interpreted as being directed to the particular window. But how do you know the window’s name? Take a look at the javascript or link that opened it:

<a href="somewhere.html" target="windowName">Click here to open a new window</a>

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:

for (String handle : driver.getWindowHandles()) {
    driver.switchTo().window(handle);
}

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

driver.switchTo().frame("frameName");

It’s possible to access subframes by separating the path with a dot, and you can specify the frame by its index too. That is:

driver.switchTo().frame("frameName.0.child");

would go to the frame named “child” of the first subframe of the frame called “frameName”.All frames are evaluated as if from *top*.

Popup Dialogs

Starting with Selenium 2.0 beta 1, there is built in support for handling popup dialog boxes. After you’ve triggered an action that opens a popup, you can access the alert with the following:

Alert alert = driver.switchTo().alert();

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 equally well on alerts, confirms, prompts. Refer to the JavaDocs for more information.

Navigation: History and Location

Earlier, we covered navigating to a page using the “get” command (driver.get("http://www.example.com")) 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 this lives on the main WebDriver interface, but it’s simply a synonym to:

driver.navigate().to("http://www.example.com");

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:

driver.navigate().forward();
driver.navigate().back();

Please be aware that this functionality depends entirely on the underlying browser. It’s just possible that something unexpected may happen when you call these 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 to use cookies. First of all, you need to be on the domain that the cookie will be valid for:

// Go to the correct domain
driver.get("http://www.example.com");

// Now set the cookie. This one's valid for the entire domain
Cookie cookie = new Cookie("key", "value");
driver.manage().addCookie(cookie);

// And now output all the available cookies for the current URL
Set<Cookie> allCookies = driver.manage().getCookies();
for (Cookie loadedCookie : allCookies) {
    System.out.println(String.format("%s -> %s", loadedCookie.getName(), loadedCookie.getValue()));
}

Drag And Drop

Here’s an example of using the Actions class to perform a drag and drop. As of rc2 this only works on the Windows platform.

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.name("source"));
WebElement target = driver.findElement(By.name("target"));

(new Actions(driver)).dragAndDrop(element, target).perform();

Driver Specifics and Tradeoffs

HtmlUnit Driver

This is currently the fastest and most lightweight implementation of WebDriver. As the name suggests, this is based on HtmlUnit.

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 differ significantly from those browsers.

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

With WebDriver, we had to make a choice; do we enable HtmlUnit’s JavaScript capabilities and run the risk of teams running into problems that only manifest themselves there, or do we leave JavaScript disabled, knowing that there are more 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 of both WebDriver and HtmlUnit, we reassess this decision: we hope to enable JavaScript by default on the HtmlUnit at some point.

Enabling JavaScript

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

HtmlUnitDriver driver = new HtmlUnitDriver();
driver.setJavascriptEnabled(true);

This will cause the HtmlUnit Driver to emulate Internet Explorer’s JavaScript handling by default.

Firefox Driver

Pros

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

Cons

• Slower than the HtmlUnit Driver

Changing the User Agent

This is easy with the Firefox Driver:

FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();
profile.addAdditionalPreference("general.useragent.override", "some UA string");
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

Mofifying the Firefox Profile

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

ProfileIni allProfiles = new ProfilesIni();
FirefoxProfile profile = allProfiles.getProfile("WebDriver");
profile.setPreferences("foo.bar", 23);
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

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

File profileDir = new File("path/to/top/level/of/profile");
FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile(profileDir);
profile.addAdditionalPreferences(extraPrefs);
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);
Enabling features that might not be wise to use in 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, they are disabled by default. To enable them:

FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();
profile.setEnableNativeEvents(true);
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

Info

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

Internet Explorer Driver

This driver has been tested with Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 on XP. It has also been successfully tested on Vista.

Pros

• Runs in a real browser and supports JavaScript

Cons

• Obviously the Internet Explorer Driver 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.

Chrome Driver

Chrome Driver is maintained / supported by the Chromium project iteslf. WebDriver is now inside of the Chrome browser iteslf. Please see our wiki for the most up to date info.

Pros

• Runs in a real browser and supports JavaScript
• Because Chrome is a Webkit-based browser, the Chrome Driver may allow you to verify that your site works in Safari. Note that since Chrome uses its own V8 JavaScript engine rather than Safari’s Nitro engine, JavaScript execution may differ.

Cons

• Slower than the HtmlUnit Driver

Getting running with Chrome Driver

Note: this section is likely out of date. If you used the commands at the beginning of this chapter for setting up a Selenium 2 project you should already have the Chrome Driver along with all the other drivers.

Download the Chrome Driver executable and follow the other instructions on the wiki page

Opera Driver

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

iPhone Driver

See the iPhone Driver wiki article in the Selenium Wiki for information on using the Mac iOS Driver.

Android Driver

See the Android Driver wiki article in the Selenium Wiki for information on using the Android Driver.

WebDriver-Backed Selenium-RC

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

Selenium-WebDriver is used like this:

// 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");

// Get the underlying WebDriver implementation back. This will refer to the
// same WebDriver instance as the "driver" variable above.
WebDriver driverInstance = ((WebDriverBackedSelenium) selenium).getUnderlyingWebDriver();

    //Finally, close the browser. Call stop on the WebDriverBackedSelenium instance
    //instead of calling driver.quit(). Otherwise, the JVM will continue running after
    //the browser has been closed.
    selenium.stop();

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 API to 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 JavaScript methods 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 to provide that support while still using the WebDriver API, you can make use of theSeleneseCommandExecutor It is done like this:

Capabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities()
capabilities.setBrowserName("safari");
CommandExecutor executor = new SeleneseCommandExecutor("http:localhost:4444/", "http://www.google.com/", capabilities);
WebDriver driver = new RemoteWebDriver(executor, capabilities);

There are currently some major limitations with this approach, notably that findElements doesn’t work as expected. Also, because we’re using Selenium Core for the heavy lifting of driving the browser, you are limited by the JavaScript sandbox.

Selenium WebDriver Wiki

You can find further resources for WebDriver in WebDriver’s wiki

Next Steps

This chapter has simply been a high level walkthrough of WebDriver and some of its key capabilities. Once getting familiar with the Selenium-WebDriver API you will then want to learn how to build test suites for maintainability, extensibility, and reduced fragility when features of the AUT frequently change. The approach most Selenium experts are now recommending is to design your test code using the Page Object Design Pattern along with possibly a Page Factor. Selenium-WebDriver provides support for this by supplying a PageFactory class. This is presented, along with other advanced topics, in the next chapter. Also, for high-level description of this technique, you may want to look at the Test Design Considerations chapter. Both of these chapters present techniques for writing more maintainable tests by making your test code more modular.

© Copyright 2010, Selenium Project. Last updated on Sep 07, 2011.