Basic Selenium Webdriver Program

Introduction#

This topic aims to show the basic web driver program in selenium supported languages like C#, Groovy, Java, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby.

Journey includes opening browser driver —> Google Page —> shutdown the browser

C#

using OpenQA.Selenium;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome;

namespace BasicWebdriver
{
    class WebDriverTest
    {
        static void Main()
        {
            using (var driver = new ChromeDriver())
            {
                driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("https://www.google.com");
            }
        }
    }
}

The above ‘program’ will navigate to the Google homepage, and then close down the browser after fully loading the page.

using (var driver = new ChromeDriver())

This instantiates a new WebDriver object using the IWebdriver interface and creates a new browser window instance. In this example we are using ChromeDriver (though this could be replaced by the appropriate driver for whichever browser we wanted to use). We are wrapping this with a using statement, because IWebDriver implements IDisposable, thus not needing to explicitly type in driver.Quit();.

In case you haven’t downloaded your WebDriver using NuGet, then you will need to pass an argument in the form of a path to the directory where the driver itself “chromedriver.exe” is located.

Navigating

driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("https://www.google.com");

and

driver.Url = "https://www.google.com";

Both of these lines do the same thing. They instruct the driver to navigate to a specific URL, and to wait until the page is loaded before it moves to the next statement.

There are other methods tied to navigation such as Back(), Forward() or Refresh().

After that, the using block safely quits, and disposes the object.

Python

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

def set_up_driver():
    path_to_chrome_driver = 'chromedriver'
    return webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=path_to_chrome_driver)

def get_google():
    driver = set_up_driver()
    driver.get('https://www.google.com')
    tear_down(driver)

def tear_down(driver):
    driver.quit()

if '__main__' == __name__:
    get_google()

The above ‘program’ will navigate to the Google homepage, and then close down the browser before completing.

if '__main__' == __name__:
    get_google()

First we have our main function, our point of entry into the program, that calls get_google().

def get_google():
    driver = set_up_driver()

get_google() then starts by creating our driver instance via set_up_driver():

def set_up_driver():
    path_to_chrome_driver = 'chromedriver'
    return webdriver.Chrome(executable_path=path_to_chrome_driver)

Whereby we state where chromedriver.exe is located, and instantiate our driver object with this path. The remainder of get_google() navigates to Google:

driver.get('https://www.google.com')

And then calls tear_down() passing the driver object:

tear_down(driver)

tear_down() simply contains one line to shut down our driver object:

driver.quit()

This tells the driver to close all open browser windows and dispose of the browser object, as we have no other code after this call this effectively ends the program.

Java

The code below is all about 3 steps.

Opening a chrome browser
Opening google page
Shutdown the browser

import org.openqa.selenium;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome;

public class WebDriverTest {
    public static void main(String args[]) {
        System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\path\\to\\chromedriver.exe");
        WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

        driver.get("https://www.google.com");
        driver.quit();
    }
}

The above ‘program’ will navigate to the Google homepage, and then close down the browser before completing.

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\path\\to\\chromedriver.exe");
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

The first line tells the system where to find the ChromeDriver (chromedriver.exe) executable. We then create our driver object by calling the ChromeDriver() constructor, again we could be calling our constructor here for any browser/platform.

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

This tells our driver to navigate to the specified url: https://www.google.com. The Java WebDriver API provides the get() method directly on the WebDriver interface, though further navigation methods can be found via the navigate() method, e.g. driver.navigate.back().

Once the page has finished loading we immediately call:

driver.quit();

This tells the driver to close all open browser windows and dispose of the driver object, as we have no other code after this call this effectively ends the program.

driver.close();

Is an instruction (not shown here) to the driver to close only the active window, in this instance as we only have a single window the instructions would cause identical results to calling quit().

Java - Best practise with page classes

Usecase : Login to FB account

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.testng.annotations.BeforeClass;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;

public class FaceBookLoginTest {
    private static WebDriver driver;
    HomePage homePage;
    LoginPage loginPage;
    @BeforeClass
    public void openFBPage(){
        driver = new FirefoxDriver();
        driver.get("https://www.facebook.com/");
        loginPage = new LoginPage(driver);
    }
    @Test
    public void loginToFB(){
       loginPage.enterUserName("username");
       loginPage.enterPassword("password");
       homePage = loginPage.clickLogin();
        System.out.println(homePage.getUserName());
    }

}

Page classes : Login Page & Home Page Login page class :

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.support.FindBy;

public class LoginPage {

    WebDriver driver;
    public LoginPage(WebDriver driver){
        this.driver = driver;
    }
    @FindBy(id="email")
    private WebElement loginTextBox;

    @FindBy(id="pass")
    private WebElement passwordTextBox;

    @FindBy(xpath = ".//input[@data-testid='royal_login_button']")
    private WebElement loginBtn;

    public void enterUserName(String userName){
        if(loginTextBox.isDisplayed()) {
            loginTextBox.clear();
            loginTextBox.sendKeys(userName);
        }
        else{
            System.out.println("Element is not loaded");
        }
    }
    public void enterPassword(String password){
        if(passwordTextBox.isDisplayed()) {
            passwordTextBox.clear();
            passwordTextBox.sendKeys(password);
        }
        else{
            System.out.println("Element is not loaded");
        }
    }
    public HomePage clickLogin(){
        if(loginBtn.isDisplayed()) {
            loginBtn.click();
        }
        return new HomePage(driver);
    }
}

Home page class:

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.support.FindBy;

public class HomePage {

    WebDriver driver;
    public HomePage(WebDriver driver){
        this.driver = driver;
    }

    @FindBy(xpath=".//a[@data-testid='blue_bar_profile_link']/span")
    private WebElement userName;

    public String getUserName(){
        if(userName.isDisplayed()) {
            return userName.getText();
        }
        else {
            return "Username is not present";
        }
    }

}