Upgrading Selenium 2.0b2 to 2.0b3 - Python

Selenium 2.0b3 was recently released. My current company is using Selenium 2.0 for web testing and the preferred language for the team is python. If you are familiar with python you might know that upgrading a site-package (like Selenium) is as simple as:

pip install selenium

One of the staff did this and immediately the test suite broke. The line of code which broke was:

host="localhost"
port=4444
browser="firefox"
wd = webdriver.Remote(command_executor='http://' + host + ':' + str(port) + '/wd/hub', browser_name=browser, platform='ANY')

One of the nice things about using Eclipse (my IDE of choice) is you can hold down the CTRL key and click a method to jump to the source code. So I held down the CTRL key (actually it was the Command key because I'm on a Mac) and clicked on Remote. This took me to the class for Remote. The __init__ method is the constructor.

When I looked at the constructor for 2.0b3 it was immediately obvious that the constructor had changed. The old constructor (2.0b2) was:

def __init__(self, command_executor='http://localhost:4444/wd/hub', browser_name='', platform='', version='', javascript_enabled=True)

but the new constructor (2.0b3) is:

def __init__(self, command_executor='http://127.0.0.1:4444/wd/hub', desired_capabilities=None, browser_profile=None)

So the first parameter, command_executor, is the same but all the other parameters have been changed to a desired_capabilities. So what is desired_capabilities? It is a python dictionary. The format for a dictionary is:

dc = { "browser_name" : browser, "platform" : 'ANY' }

This one little change almost fixed things. A little more digging into the source code and I found that the dictionary should be using "browserName" and there doesn't seem to be any support for platform anymore. Since we only care about the browser, I changed the dictionary to:

dc = { "browserName" : browser }

and this solved everything.

Lesson Learned: you have to dig into the source code to figure out what is going on.

P.S. reading the comments in the source code indicated that the start_session method, which uses the desired_capabilities, it still talks about the parameters browser_name and platform. It is clear that the comments have not been updated to reflect the code.