selenic 0.5.0

Some selenium infrastructure for testing.

Selenic is a collection of Python code which is used for testing browser-based software through Selenium. It is currently tailored for the projects at Mangalam Research but there is nothing preventing it from being used for other projects.

If you want to run tests in Chrome, you only need chromedriver. Chromedriver is here. The documentation for its use is here.

Please look at the examples in the examples subdirectory and read the source code to know how this all works.

Selenium Issues

Native Events

It is very often the case that tests which work with native events fail when using synthetic events. Keep this in mind.

Misc

• Selenium 2.35.0: ActionChains.send_keys is broken. Selenic patches ActionChains to fix this problem.

• Selenium 2.35.0: It is impossible to know whether a Firefox instance is able to handle native events or not. Firefox 22 with 2.35.0 is known to handle native events.

• Selenium <= 2.40.0: Handling of colon in locators that use class names in IE is completely broken. Selenic attempts to fix the issue. See below for some notes.

Colons in Class Names in IE

This is known to occur with Selenium <= 2.40.0. The normal way to escape colons that appear as part of class names is to put a backslash in front of the colon. This works without issue in Firefox and Chrome but in IE there’s a bug. The solution is to double up on the backslashes. Where "foo\\:bar" would work everywhere else, for IE we need "foo\\\\:bar". But there’s a problem if we want our code to work on multiple platforms.

Selenic attempts to work around the issue depending on how COLON_HANDLING is set:

• Not set, or set to NONE: Selenic will check what broswer you are using and what version of Selenium you are using. If it determines that the combination is at risk for colons, it will act as if the setting was True, otherwise it will act as if the setting was False.

• True: turn on the workaround.

• False: turn off the workaround.

The workaround itself is pretty simple. Selenic patches the driver created from selenic.config.Config and it patches WebElement so that every time Selenium searches for elements by class name, it searches instead by a CSS selector which is equivalent.

Debugging the Firefox Driver

1. Download the version of Selenium that corresponds to whatever API you are using.

2. Unzip.

3. Edit javascript/firefox-driver/build.desc to eliminate the platform binaries you do not need. These look like paths of the form platform/Linux.... Some are for Windows. (This saves a huge amount of build time and space).

4. Issue:

   $ bash ./go //javascript/firefox-driver:webdriver