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)

Important methods in Selenium

We will have a look at a few of the very important and frequently used methods and their signatures.

These are methods invoked by the WebDriver instance:

  • findElement(By) versus findElements(By): Both these methods take an argument of type By. The findElement method calls the FindElements method and returns a WebElement. If multiple elements are found with the same locator, it returns the first WebElement. The findElements, on the other hand, returns a list of WebElements. The findElement throws a NoSuchElementException if it is unable to find an element using the locator provided in the parameter list. The findElements returns an empty list if no elements are found using the given locator.
  • get(String): The get method takes a String URL as a parameter. It navigates to the URL supplied as a parameter. The URL can be in the form of http://www.google...