Book Image

Selenium WebDriver Quick Start Guide

By : Pinakin Chaubal
Book Image

Selenium WebDriver Quick Start Guide

By: Pinakin Chaubal

Overview of this book

Selenium WebDriver is a platform-independent API for automating the testing of both browser and mobile applications. It is also a core technology in many other browser automation tools, APIs, and frameworks. This book will guide you through the WebDriver APIs that are used in automation tests. Chapter by chapter, we will construct the building blocks of a page object model framework as you learn about the required Java and Selenium methods and terminology. The book starts with an introduction to the same-origin policy, cross-site scripting dangers, and the Document Object Model (DOM). Moving ahead, we'll learn about XPath, which allows us to select items on a page, and how to design a customized XPath. After that, we will be creating singleton patterns and drivers. Then you will learn about synchronization and handling pop-up windows. You will see how to create a factory for browsers and understand command design patterns applicable to this area. At the end of the book, we tie all this together by creating a framework and implementing multi-browser testing with Selenium Grid.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Window handles

Let's understand what a window handle is. A window handle is an alphanumeric ID that gets assigned to each window when the object of WebDriver is instantiated. Selenium uses this ID to identify each window and switch between them.

Fetching the window handles

In order to switch between all available windows, Selenium first needs to get hold of the window handles. For this purpose, there are two methods provided: getWindowHandle() and getWindowHandles():

  • getWindowHandle(): This method, when invoked on the WebDriver object, returns the handle of the current window which has the focus
  • getWindowHandles(): This method, when invoked on the WebDriver object, returns a set of all open windows
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