How to find a popup window if it does not have a name

When using Selenium 2.0 (WebDriver) you will sometimes find clicking a link opens a popup window. Before you can interact with the elements on the new window you need to switch to the new window. If the new window has a name you can use the name to switch to the popup window:

    driver.switchTo().window(name);

However, if the window does not have a name you need to use the window handle. The problem is that every time you run the code the window handle will change. So you need to find the window handle for the popup window. To do this I use getWindowHandles() to find all the open windows, I click the link to open the new window. Next I use getWindowHandles() to get a second set of window handles. If I remove all the window handles of the first set from the second set I should end up with a set with only one element. That element will be the handle of the popup window.

Here is the code:

String getPopupWindowHandle(WebDriver driver, WebElement link) {

    // get all the window handles before the popup window appears
    Set<String> beforePopup = driver.getWindowHandles();

    // click the link which creates the popup window
    link.click();

    // get all the window handles after the popup window appears
    Set<String> afterPopup = driver.getWindowHandles();

    // remove all the handles from before the popup window appears
    afterPopup.removeAll(beforePopup);

    // there should be only one window handle left
    if(afterPopup.size() == 1) {
        return (String)afterPopup.toArray()[0];
    }
    return null;
}

To use this I simply call it with the WebElement which clicking opens the new window. You want to add some error handling to this but the basic idea of finding the popup window is here. To use the method I would use:

String currentWindowHandle = driver.getWindowHandle();
String popupWindowHandle = getPopupWindowHandle(driver, link);
driver.switchTo().window(popupWindowHandle);
// do stuff on the pop window
// close the popup window
driver.switchTo().window(currentWindowHandle)

Regular Expression

I've been processing files and data a lot lately which means I've been using Regular Expressions.

Regular Expressions is a very powerful pattern matching tool. If you have used MSDOS or Bourne shell you are familiar with wildcards like "*.txt" will match all files ending with .txt. Regular expressions take this to a whole new level.

First thing to note is there are different implementations of Regular Expression. The basic concepts are the same and most the syntax is the same but there are subtle differences. I'll talk more about this as I give examples of the language.

The second thing to note is, some of the special symbols from MSDOS or Bourne shell are used by Regular Expression but they have a completely different meaning. Most notably is the asterisk (*).

The example above, "*.txt", would be a bad Regular Expression. Why? The asterisk means the previous character zero or more times. There is no character preceding the asterisk so it is a syntax error.

For simple things like "*.txt", Regular Expression can be overly complex. The dot (.) means any character. So if I want to emulate the "*" of MSDOS, I would use ".*" in Regular Expression. If I wanted an actual dot I would use "\." in Regular Expression. So the whole "*.txt" in MSDOS becomes ".*\.txt" in Regular Expression. In most languages, the "\." would get processes as a control character by the String implementation. The slash (\) would never make it to the Regular Expression parser. So if you want "\." to reach the Regular Expression parser, you need to use "\\." because the String implementation will parse this, resulting in "\.", then pass it to the Regular Expression parser.

The language I use most right now is Java. If you look at the Java API documentation for the Pattern class you will see this is the Regular Expression parser.

Some of the basic stuff:

• Anything not a special character is matched verbatim. So in my example above "txt" only matches "txt".
• If you want to match a special character you need to escape it. From my example, the dot is a special character. To match a dot and nothing else you use "\\.". I use double slash because Java will parse the "\\" before sending it to Pattern.
• Special characters from things like println() or printf() work the same in Regular Expression. These are "\t" for tab, "\n" for newline, "\r" for return, "\f" for form-feed, "\a" for a bell. A bell in ASCII is control-g or "\x07" but "\a" is better because you shouldn't assume ASCII.
• You can have a sets using square brackets. If I have "[abc]" this will match "a", "b" or "c".
• You can use the square brackets for negation. If the first character in the set is caret (^) it means 'not'. For example, "[^abc]" would match anything not "a", not "b" and not "c".
• If you want all digits you could use "[0123456789]" but there is a shorthand for this. A range can be specified using a minus (-) symbol. This example would be "[0-9]". You can also do things like "[a-z]" but alphabetic strings can be problematic if you allow different character sets.
• If you want upper and lower case letters you might think "[a-Z]" would work but this is an error. The letter 'Z' in ASCII has a value of 90 and 'a' has a value of 97. Second attempt might be "[A-z]". This is closer but in ASCII the symbols '[', '\', ']', '^', '_' and '`' are between 'Z' and 'a'. So you have too many characters in this set. The solution is a union (like in Set Theory). You want "[a-z]" union "[A-Z]". In Regular Expression this is written as "[a-zA-Z]".
• You can also write a union as "[a-z[A-Z]]". This might seem like extra typing and in some cases it is. What if you wanted all consonants? That would be 21 letters uppercase and 21 letters lower case. A string with 42 letters (you cannot really use a single range). You could use "[b-df-hj-np-tv-zB-DF-HJ-NP-TV-Z]" but even that is a little ugly. How about: "[a-zA-Z[^aeiouAEIOU]]". When I look at that it is pretty obvious what I'm trying to match. It reads as "all letters but not vowels".
• There is 'syntactic sugar' for some things:
• Rather than "[0-9]" I can use "\d" (the d is for digit)
• Rather than "[^0-9]" I can use "\D" (uppercase implies NOT)
• Rather than "[ \t\n\x0b\\f\r]" I can use "\s" (the s is for space or whiteSpace)
• Rather than "[^ \t\n\x0b\\f\r]" I can use "\S" (uppercase implies NOT)
• A 'word' is a String made of letters, digits or underscore. A character of a 'word' therefore would be: "[a-zA-Z\d_]". Syntactic sugar for this is "\w".
• Alternately, "\W" is for not a 'word' character.

Some slightly more advanced stuff would be boundary qualifiers:

• The caret (^) not in a set means beginning of line. So if I have the string "^a" it matches if 'a' is the first character in the string. With wildcards or substring matching this can be very helpful. For example, "^def" will not match a substring check with "abcdefghi" but "def" will match.
• The dollar ($) is for end of line. For example, "def$" will not match "abcdefghi" but "def" will match.
• Capture groups are used for substitution. For example, if I have a string with my full name, "Darrell Grainger" and I want to change it to "Grainger, Darrell" I would do the following:

String name = "Darrell Grainger";
String flip = name.replaceFirst("(\\w*) (\\w*)", "$2, $1");

• The "\\w*" means get the first word. It will match "Darrell". By wrapping it with parenthesis it becomes a 'capture group'. So the first "(\\w*)" gets saved into "$1" and the second "(\\w*)" gets saved into "$2".  In other implementations of Regular Expression, capture groups are saved into things like "\1" rather than "$1".
• Capture groups are great if you are processing a number of strings in an array. This example will flip the first and second word for any set of strings.

More advance stuff would be Greedy quantifiers versus Reluctant quantifiers. Lets look at this with capture groups.

String s = "aaabbbaaa";
String s1 = s.replaceFirst("(a*)(.*)", "$2 $1");
String s2 = s.replaceFirst("(a*?)(.*)", "$2 $1");

The string s1 will contain "bbbaaa aaa".

The string s2 will contain "aaabbbaaa ".

For s1, what happened is "(a*)" matched "aaa" and "(.*)" matched "bbbaaa".

For s2, what happened is "(a*?)" was a Reluctant quantifier. Because "(.*)" is a Greedy quantifier, it captured everything. This left nothing for "(a*?)" to capture.

What happens under the hood is that the Regular Expression parser will find the Greedy quantifiers, read in the entire string and see if it matches. If it does not it pushes one character back out, checks for a match, pushes a character back out, checks for a match. It keeps doing this until it finds a match. Whatever didn't match is used to process Reluctant quantifiers. 

While processing the Reluctant quantifiers the parser will read in one character, check for a match, read another character, check for a match, read another character, check for a match. It keeps doing this so long as things are matching. The moment there isn't a match it stops.

So the s1 string processed "(a*)" first, because it is a Greedy quantifier and captured "aaa" into "$1". Then it processed "(.*)" which matched the rest of the string. This captured "bbbaaa" into "$2".

With the string s2 it processed "(.*)" because it is a Greedy quantifier and "(a*?)" is a Reluctant quantifier. The "(.*)" grabbed the entire string and put it into "$2". This left an empty string "". The empty string is used to process the Reluctant quantifier "(a*?)" and "" gets captured into "$1".

Here is a table of the Greedy versus Reluctant quantifiers:

Greedy	Reluctant	Meaning
X?	X??	X, once or not at all
X*	X*?	X, zero or more times
X+	X+?	X, one or more times
X{n}	X{n}?	X, exactly n times
X{n,}	X{n,}?	X, at least n times
X{n,m}	X{n,m}?	X, at least n but not more than m times

There is more the Regular Expressions but this information is what you need for most situations.
.

Frames and WebDriver

When dealing with iframes and WebDriver things can quickly get confusing. Especially if you add popup windows to the mix.

When you have an iframe, it is a separate DOM. You can look at it as a separate web page inside the current web page. Lets take an example diagram:

If we look at the source code for this it might be something like:

<html>
    <body>
    <iframe src="frame1.html" style="border: red;">
        <html>
        ...
        </html>
    </iframe>
    <iframe id="2" src="frame2.html" style="border: green;">
        <iframe id="2-1" src="frame2-1.html">...</iframe>
        <iframe id="2-2" src="frame2-2.html">...</iframe>

        <iframe id="2-3" src="frame2-3.html">...</iframe>

        <iframe id="2-4" src="frame2-4.html">....</iframe>

        <iframe id="2-5" src="frame2-5.html">....</iframe>

        <iframe id="2-6" src="frame2-6.html">...</iframe>

        <iframe id="2-7" src="frame2-7.html">...</iframe>

        <iframe id="2-8" src="frame2-8.html">...</iframe>

        <iframe id="2-9" src="frame2-9.html">...</iframe>

    ...
    </iframe>
    <iframe id="3" src="frame3.html" style="border: brown;">

        <iframe id="3-1" src="frame3-1.html">...</iframe>

        <iframe id="3-2" src="frame3-2.html">...</iframe>

    ...
    </iframe>
    <iframe id="4" src="frame4.html" style="border: blue;">

        <iframe id="4-1" src="frame4-1.html">...</iframe>

        <iframe id="4-2" src="frame4-2.html">...</iframe>

        <iframe id="4-3" src="frame4-3.html">...</iframe>

        <iframe id="4-4" src="frame4-4.html">...</iframe>

        <iframe id="4-5" src="frame4-5.html">...</iframe>

        <iframe id="4-6" src="frame4-6.html">...</iframe>

        <iframe id="4-7" src="frame4-7.html">...</iframe>

        <iframe id="4-8" src="frame4-8.html">...</iframe>

        <iframe id="4-9" src="frame4-9.html">...</iframe>

    ...
    </iframe>
    </body>
</html>

All the rectangles in the diagram are iframes. The iframe with the red border would be the first iframe in the HTML code. Inside each iframe will be a full HTML page. It will have the <html></html> and everything which goes inside an HTML page.

So in WebDriver you have a switchTo method. The switchTo method returns a WebDriver.TargetLocator interface. If we look at the WebDriver.TargetLocator interface we see the following methods:

• frame(int index)
• frame(String nameOrId)
• frame(WebElement frameElement)
• defaultContent()

We can use the index to find the frame. If you have one main page and it contains a set of iframes, this is fine. However, if you have frames within frames it can get a little difficult to follow. Even if you can figure it out today, you will have to go through the whole exercise again if they change the layout by moving, adding or deleting a frame.

The best way to find a frame is with the id attribute or find the frame element using findElement() then use the third version listed above.

Now here is the most important thing to remember: you cannot jump in two or more frames. So if you are at the main content page and want an element in frame3-1.html you have to switch to frame3.html then to frame3.1.html. Assuming we are at the main page, the code for this might look like:


    driver.switchTo().frame("3");
    driver.switchTo().frame("3-1");


Additionally, if I have switched to frame4-7.html and I want to go to frame2-1.html, I have to go back to the top, then to frame2.html, then to frame2-1.html.

So how do you get to the top? If you are dealing with iframes then the defaultContent() method will take you to the main page, above all the iframes. If you are dealing with frames, defaultContent() will take you to the first frame.

So you can either leave focus were every you last left it then every action in a frame assumes you are at some unknown focus, call driver.switchTo().defaultContent() to get to the top, then go down to the frame you want OR you can start at the top, go to the frame you want then back to the top when you are done. The first way you go to the top as needed. The second way you ensure you are always at the top. Both ways work. It is just a matter of convention.

Sometimes drawing the layout of the page is a little harder then the diagram above. Additionally, if the layout changes, it can be difficult to alter the picture, depending on how you drew it. What I like to do is draw the relationships like a tree. For example, the diagram above might be draw as:

From this tree the rules are that you can go down a branch (switchTo().frame() from the parent) or you can get to the root of the tree (defaultContent() for iframes). You cannot jump across nodes or up levels.

Help for selenium-server-standalone.jar

 
One thing you might not realize if you have been trying to get command line help from the Selenium Server jar file is that there are two different help outputs.

If you run the server with no inputs it just runs with no help at all.

As an old UNIX/Linux guy I have gotten used to the standard of a single dash and a single letter (e.g. -h for help) or two dashes and a word (e.g. --help) I was a little thrown by the Selenium Server jar file.

The reason is that -h will give you help for the Standalone Selenium Server but --help will launch the Standalone Selenium Server. The Grid Selenium Server is in there but getting help for it is not obvious.

The help switch for Grid Selenium Server is actually -help (not the same as -h but not quite the Linux convention). Actually, this will give you the help message for the Standalone Server and the Grid Server.

For running the Grid, you need to specify hub or node. If you want to run it as a hub you would use:

java -jar selenium-server-standalone.jar -role hub

Looking at the rest of the help you will see some switches have (hub), some have (node) and some have (hub & node). If the switch has a (hub) then that switch applies only when using -role hub. Conversely, if it has (node) then it only applies to -role node.

Generally, you will set up one hub and multiple nodes. For example, the application I am currently testing needs to be tested on:

• Windows 7 with IE9
• Windows XP with IE6
• Mac OS X 10.8 with Safari 10

So I would run Grid Selenium Server with (omit the text after the # symbol):

• -role hub # (defaults to localhost and 4444)
• -role node -hubHost hubmachine -hubPort 4444 -browser browserName=iexplore,version=9,platform=VISTA # (Windows 7, IE9)
• -role node -hubHost  hubmachine -hubPort 4444 -browser browserName=iexplore,version=6,platform=XP # (Windows XP, IE6)
• -role node -hubHost  hubmachine -hubPort 4444 -browser browserName=safariproxy,version=10,platform=MAC # (Mac OS X, Safari 10)

The -hubHost and -hubPort just need to match the host and port for the hub. If you specify a -port for the hub then you need to change the settings for the nodes as well. In this example, I have the hub running on the computer with name hubmachine.

The -browser option is a little tricker. It mirrors the Selenium code. 

If you look at the Selenium Client source code for src/org/openqa/selenium/remote/BrowserType.java you will find a list of the strings which can be used with the browserName key. At this time for following values are permitted:

• firefox
• firefoxproxy
• safari
• opera
• iexplore
• iexploreproxy
• safariproxy
• chrome
• mock
• iehta

The platform key comes from src/org/openqa/selenium/Platform.java and valid values at this time are:

• WINDOWS
• XP
• VISTA
• MAC
• UNIX
• LINUX
• ANDROID
• ANY

When you look at the Platform.java file you will see that Windows 7 'feels like' Windows Vista. So we use the VISTA platform when we want Windows 7.

At this point, if you go to http://localhost:4444/ you'll have a link to the Grid2 Wiki and a link to the console. If you go to the console you should see an entry for each of the nodes you are running. All the nodes will be running on port 5555 but different machines.

You can also go to the Grid2 Wiki from the hub home page. You might want to take the time to have a look at that as well. There are additional parameters for the node. For example, I can add maxInstances=3 to the browser string and it will let me run up to 3 instances of that browser on the computer. By default the maxInstances will be 5.

 

Technical Debt

What is technical debt? 

For the past ten years I have been hearing the expression "Technical Debt" in reference to programming. But what is technical debt?

At the same time I noticed the best project managers would have a summary chart for upper management. It broke things down into red light, yellow light or green light. The idea was that upper management have a lot of information to sift through so we needed to keep it simple.

I think the same idea applies to technical debt. You don't need a precise measurement of technical debt but you need to know if it is growing (red light), stable but still there (yellow light) or reducing (green light).

This still leaves the question, what is technical debt? If I'm running a business and my business needs a piece of machinery to finish a project. I cannot get money from the customer until I deliver the product but I need money to buy the machine to finish the project. So I get a small business loan, buy the machine, finish the project and sell it to the customer. At this point I have debt. Is the interest on the debt acceptable? If the interest is equal to the profit I made on the sale then I'll never get ahead (yellow light). If the interest is greater than the profit I made then I'll slowly go deeper and deeper into debt (red light). But if the interest is less than the profit I made, I can pay down or pay off my debt. BEFORE I get the loan, I need to know the profit will be greater than the interest on the loan. I need to know I will still turn a profit and can get out of debt.

Technical debt is similar. It MUST be a conscience decision to do something which is not good from a development point of view but which I'll be able to correct after the product is out the door. For example, I'm going to pick an inexpensive or easy to implement technology which I know will not scale. I know it will exceed the current load. I can predict, if successful, this choice will be a bottleneck in 18 months. In other words, the 'interest' on this 'loan' will eat away all my profit in 18 months. The long I wait to change to a more scalable technology the less profitable my project will be.

Worse would be to not only fail to pay off or at least pay down this technical debt but to incur more technical debt. Most people would like to have a nice home, a good car, annual trips to Europe or the Caribbean, send their kids to the best schools, etc. but would you use a credit card to pay for it all? When the bill collector comes knocking would you apply for another credit card to pay off the first credit card? Hopefully, you answered no. Even if you didn't, credit bureaus like Equifax or TransUnion would quickly make it impossible for you to get more credit.

Unfortunately, in software development there is no Equifax or TransUnion. Creating technical debt is a LOT easier than creating financial debt. This means you need to monitor your technical debt and make sure you are paying it down.

For short periods of time your technical debt might rise but the over all trend should be a reduction.

What is NOT technical debt? 

It is MORE important to understand what is not technical debt. A lot of people will chalk things up to technical debt when it is really lack of planning.

It isn't even poor planning but more a total lack of planning. Many times I have worked on projects where the project manager (or above) have made it very clear that the project must ship by a specific date. No excuses. What are you telling the programmers? You are telling them you don't care what the cost it, it has to ship by a specific date. The truth is that no one REALLY means 'money is no object'.

If you don't look at the cost of a technical compromise and just implement it, it is the equivalent of going to the local loan shark and signing a piece of paper without reading it. No successful business person would do this but I have seen Fortune 500 companies do the technical equivalent.

As a programmer, if my management tells me something has to be completed by a specific date, no matter what then they are telling me technical debt is no object. Take on whatever technical debt is necessary to get the project done on time. As a senior programmer I know they don't REALLY mean this. However, I have worked in companies where I tried to point out the technical debt is too high only to be told they don't want to hear excuses. Another programmer will swoop in and tell them he can get it done. I get demoted, the other programmer gets promoted.

Inevitably, the project ships on time and under budget. The programmer who swooped in and saved the day might even get a bonus. He might even do this again on the next release of the product. But then I noticed a pattern. Sooner or later, the programmer does a lateral shift to another department or worse, leaves the company to go work for the competition. Shortly after his departure from the project, the new developer starts trying to point out how much technical debt the previous programmer created. For example, a 50,000+ line function which uses lots of GOTOs and stack manipulation to make things work. Adding a new feature which should take 2 days to implement takes months and introduces dozens of new bugs in other features.

Reducing technical debt.

So what if you already have technical debt, planned or otherwise? You need to pay it down. I worked at one company where they went to their customers and let them know they had incurred a lot of unplanned technical   debt. They needed to pay it down. This meant the product would not be growing new features but it would be more stable and scalable. Most the customers looked at the market and believed we could still stay ahead of the competition plus the cost of re-training staff on a new product, creating a business relationship with a new company, etc. would be more costly than giving us a chance. Some major clients walked away and we took a big hit. The clients who did give us a second chance wanted to see that we had a plan. They wanted to see how we would make sure it didn't happen again. They wanted to see a road map of how we'd get back to adding new features. We had to regain their trust.

Hopefully you never get to this point. You want to start addressing unplanned technical debt before it gets this bad. But how do you do it?

Try and leave this world a little better than you found it. - Robert Baden-Powell.

This is a quote from the father of scouting. The idea was, when you went camping to leave the camp site in better condition than you found it. If you show up at a camp site and someone has left some garbage, pick up their garbage as well as any garbage you create. If they trampled some saplings, plant new saplings.

I used to be a tradesman. Many homes in North America have aluminium wiring. Aluminium wiring was used because copper was in high demand and electricians could save money using aluminium wiring. However, the aluminium cannot handle as high a load. Homes were 40 to 60 Amp service. Today we are finding homes with 100 to 200 Amp service. The aluminium wiring cannot handle the higher amperage and fires occur.

New home owners buy a used home only to find out that it has aluminium wiring. At first, insurance companies were telling home owners you had to replace all the wiring or no insurance. Mortgage companies would then say, no insurance == no mortgage. So the home owner needed to come up with $50,000 to $70,000 to re-wire their new home.

This would be the equivalent of saving, I have too much technical debt so for the next year I'm going to add no new features and just refactor the code to remove technical debt. After a year the product will look the same from a customer's point of view but you will have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. No customer is going to pay extra for a product that looks the same from their perspective. So you are out the money. Just like a new home owner saddled with $50,000 of extra debt on day 1 of their new home, this sort of debt can ruin a company. There is no way most companies can afford to take a year to remove technical debt.

The insurance companies soon realized they were asking the impossible and losing a LOT of potential customers. So they told the new home owners that whenever they renovated a room they needed to make removing the aluminium wiring part of the project.

Software companies need to do the same thing. Rather than give the customer nothing and spend 100% of your time reducing technical debt, whenever you adding a feature you should remove the technical debt as part of adding the feature. In other words, try and leave the software a little better than you found it.

Rather than removing all technical debt in a year it might take you 3 to 5 years but you are still adding new features and therefore getting revenue from customers.

How much time do you spend removing technical debt and how much time adding new features? This is a judgement call. You have to add enough new feature to make the customer feel they are getting their money's worth but leave enough time to reduce the technical debt.

Remember, it might have taken you 5 to 10 years to create the technical debt. It is not unreasonable to take a few years to remove it.

My environment for Selenium 2.0 (WebDriver)

One thing I believe to be very important for any sort of software development (and test automation with Selenium is software development) is having a good environment. So here is how I set up my environment to start with Selenium 2.0 and Java.

What you need:

1. Java (go to  http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/index.html)
1. I typically go with Java SE 1.6.0. If you don't need the latest, go with something more mature.
2. Download the full SDK and docs.
3. Install them in C:\jdk1.6.0_30 (assuming you downloaded build 30)
4. I like to put it in the root of the C drive with no spaces in case other things don't like spaces.
5. Unpack the docs into the same directory so they are easy to find. 
2. Eclipse (go to  http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/)
1. I typically go with Eclipse IDE for Java Developers because it has everything for Selenium and it is small.
3. SVN (go to  http://subversion.apache.org/)
1. You need some sort of source control.
2. I usually go with Git but more people are still using Subversion.
3. There are more tutorials on SVN and better support.
4. Selenium (go to  http://code.google.com/p/selenium/downloads/list)
1. You'll need to download:
1. selenium-java-2.19.0.zip (or whatever the latest version is)
2. selenium-server-standalone-2.19.0.jar (or whatever the latest version is)
2. Unpack the zip file to some location
1. I'll typically unzip them into the workspace for the project
2. I'll also put the jar file in the same location
3. This way I can add the jar files to subversion
5. Eclipse support for SVN (go to  http://subclipse.tigris.org/ )
1. Normally I would suggest using Marketplace from the Help menu but not for the latest SVN client.
2. I like subclipse for an SVN client.
3. Once on the subclipse site go to download and install.
4. Copy the link for Eclipse Update Site URL for 1.8.x
5. Go to Eclipse Help->Install New Software...
6. Click Add...
1. Name: subclipse 1.8.x
2. Location: the update site URL you copied above.
7. Select all
8. Unselect Mylyn 3.x if you don't want it.
9. Follow the install wizard
6. Adding the JDK to Eclipse
1. Go to Window->Preferences in Eclipse
2. Expand Java
3. Select Installed JREs
4. Click Add...
5. Select Standard VM
6. Set JRE home to C:\jdk1.6.0_30\jre
7. Set JRE name to JDK 1.6.0
8. Everything else can be left as default.
7. Creating a project
1. Select File->New->Java Project
1. Project name: something relating to the application you are testing
2. I usually go with the defaults.
3. Maybe change the JRE.
4. Click Next >
5. On the Libraries tab
6. Add JARs... (add External JARs... if you didn't put them in the project workspace)
7. Go to the location you unzip the Selenium files.
8. Select the selenium-java-2.19.0.jar and selenium-java-2.19.0-src.jar files and add them.
9. Add JARs... (add External JARs... if you didn't put them in the project workspace)
10. Go to the location you unzip the Selenium files.
11. Go to the libs folder and add all the jar files in there.
12. Add JARs... (add External JARs... if you didn't put them in the project workspace)
13. Go to the location you downloaded the selenium-server-standalone-2.19.0.jar file
14. Add this file to the libraries.
2. Finish the rest of the project creation using defaults.
3. You can now start adding JUnit Test Cases to the project
1. I select JUnit 4
2. I select a package which follows Java conventions
3. For example, com.mycompany.selenium.application where application is the application we are testing.
4. Add a setUp() and tearDown()
5. Finish
4. Have a look at  http://seleniumhq.org/docs/03_webdriver.html for what to put in the setUp(), tearDown() and test cases.

The most important thing about using Selenium with Java is that you really need to know Java, Source Control (Subversion), an IDE (Eclipse) and a test framework (JUnit) before you even start using Selenium. So search the web for basic Java tutorials, play with Eclipse, check out http://www.junit.org/ and search for tutorials on JUnit 4 then look at the docs on Selenium HQ.

If you need help with Selenium and WebDriver, post a message to http://groups.google.com/group/webdriver. I usually respond to people there on a regular basis.

Update to using WebDriver / Selenum 2.0 with Safari

Around this time last year I wrote an article about using Safari with WebDriver. You can find this article at http://darrellgrainger.blogspot.com/2011/02/using-selenium-20-with-webdriver-and.html.

It has been a year and there is still no SafariDriver which extends WebDriver. Unfortunately, Safari 5.0 and 5.1 have hit the market and the Selenium 1.0 "*safari" driver is no longer working. As the Selenium look at dropping support for older web browsers they are also looking into supporting things like Safari 5.x.

Ideally, I would like to see:

    WebDriver driver = new SafariDriver();


or

    URL hub = new URL("http://localhost:4444/wd/hub");
    DesiredCapabilities dc = DesiredCapabilities.safari();
    WebDriver driver = new RemoteWebDriver(hub, dc);


Until this happens, we'll have to rely on using Selenium 1.0 to create an instance of Safari. But if "*safari" is no longer working and there are no plans to update it, what do we do? The solution appears to be use "*safariproxy" instead.

Looking at the code for SeleneseCommandExecutor() there are two constructors. The first takes as input a Selenium instance. The second takes as input a CommandProcessor. The second constructor actually calls the first constructor. So either method will work. So here it is:

    String baseURL = "http://www.google.com";
    Selenium sel = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, "*safariproxy", baseURL);
    CommandExecutor executor = new SeleneseCommandExecutor(sel);
    DesiredCapabilities dc = new DesiredCapabilities();
    WebDriver browser = new RemoteWebDriver(executor, dc);


or

    String baseURL = "http://www.google.com";
    CommandProcessor cp = new HttpCommandProcessor("localhost", 4444, "*safariproxy", baseURL);
    CommandExecutor executor = new SeleneseCommandExecutor(sel);
    DesiredCapabilities dc = new DesiredCapabilities();
    WebDriver browser = new RemoteWebDriver(executor, dc);


Additionally, if the browser cannot be found, i.e. it is not in the default locations, then you can specific the path to the Safari executable using:


    "*safariproxy /Application/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari"


This code is untested but hopefully better then the previous example.

Happy automating.

.