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)

Understanding the Document Object Model and Creating Customized XPaths

In the previous chapter, we had a look at Selenium RC, WebDriver, the basic Eclipse setup, and a very simple program. Opening the browser and loading a web page is OK to start with but it is not of much use if one is not able to do operations such as clicking links and buttons, selecting values from dropdowns, entering text in a textbox, and so on. In order to achieve this, we have to explore what is called the Document Object Model (DOM). The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • What is the DOM?
  • DOM traversal
  • What is the Fillo API?
  • Debugging in Eclipse

The four major topics will be explained in detail in the form of sub-topics throughout the chapter.