Links to all posts in the series

In the previous post, we looked at the usage of Selenium with the unittest module. We will see how to use WebDriver remotely in this last post of the series.

Until now, we executed our automation scripts locally. You can also use WebDriver remotely the same way you would use it locally. With this type of work, you can keep your scripts on your machine and set up a remote machine to run your scripts.

A remote WebDriver is composed of two pieces: a client and a server. The client is your code and the server is a Java servlet.

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I am working as a software engineer for about 7 years. I usually worked with C++ on old, embedded systems.

I still feel insufficient what I work on most of the time. I wanted to list the difficulties I have through these years working on platform-dependent projects.

1. Development/Refactoring

Project codebases I worked on were large enough not to learn and feel in control quickly. It is hard to add new code/features especially if the code is poorly documented in big and old projects.

Refactoring is even harder because the possibility of breaking somewhere you don’t expect or even don’t know it…

In the previous post, we explored the page object model for writing a more maintainable and reusable code. We will see the usage of Selenium with Python’s unittest module in this post.

Unit tests are used to test the smallest testable parts of a program. Python’s unit testing framework provides test management features like setting pre/postconditions, checking the result with the expected output, and generating a report of test executions.

unittest module consists of five functionality

• Test Loader: Loads test cases and suites.
• Test Case: Implements the interface needed by the test runner.
• Test Suite: Groups set of test cases.
• …

In the previous post, we explored managing window position and dimensions and also taking screenshots with Selenium. We will see Page Object Model(POM) to create more structured and maintainable code in this post.

Until now, we have used mostly functions and single modules for our examples. If you try to manage a web page with lots of pages or components with a wide range of interactions among them, things might get complicated with this approach.

This is a general problem and as always there is a common solution for this common problem with a design pattern called “Page Object Model”.

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In the previous post, we looked at controlling mouse actions. We will see how to manage window position and dimensions and also take screenshots in this post.

In part 6 of this series, we explored window handles and switching between windows. This post will complete the window related discussion mostly.

Window Management

Screen resolution can impact how web applications render, so Selenium WebDriver provides mechanisms for moving and resizing the browser window.

get/set window size

get_window_size retrieves the size of the browser window in pixels as a dictionary with width and height keys.

width = driver.get_window_size().get("width")
height = driver.get_window_size().get("height")

set_window_size restores the window and sets…

In the previous post, we looked at working with select elements. We will look at controlling the mouse actions in this post.

We had briefly looked at some mouse actions in the Keyboard and Action Chains post. We will use action chains in the examples throughout this post too.

Selenium enables us to emulate all kinds of mouse actions like a double-click, right-click, mouse over, drag&drop, etc. These actions performed with the help of ActionChains class.

Every action called on the ActionChains object is stored in a queue and executed in order with the perform call. …

In the previous post, we looked at how to manage different kinds of alert dialogs. This post will be about working with select elements on a web page.

The <select> tag is used to create a drop-down list of options. It is usually used in a form to collect user input.

Selenium provides a Select class in the support package to manage select elements easily.

In order to start, we need to create a Select instance with a select element. If you don’t give an element with the select tag, UnexpectedTagNameException is raised.

from selenium.webdriver.support.select import Select# ...element…