Hands-On Selenium WebDriver with Java

Chapter 4. Browser-Agnostic Features

This chapter reviews those features of Selenium WebDriver that are interoperable in different web browsers. In this group, a relevant multipurpose characteristic is executing JavaScript. Also, the Selenium WebDriver API allows configuring timeouts for page and script loading. Another convenient feature is making screenshots of the browser screen, or only the portion corresponding to a given element. Then, we can manage different aspects of the controlled browser using WebDriver, such as browser size and position, history, or cookies. Then, WebDriver provides various assets for controlling specific web elements, such as dropdown lists (i.e., HTML select fields and data lists), navigation targets (i.e., windows, tabs, frames, and iframes), or dialog boxes (i.e., alerts, prompts, confirmations, and modal dialogs). Finally, we discover how to handle local and session data using web storage, implement event listeners, and use the exceptions provided by the Selenium WebDriver API.

Executing JavaScript

JavaScript is a high-level programming language supported by all major browsers. We can use JavaScript in the client side of web applications for a wide variety of operations, such as DOM manipulation, user interaction, handling requests-responses from remote servers, or working with regular expressions, among many other functions. Luckily for test automation, Selenium WebDriver allows injecting and executing arbitrary pieces of JavaScript. To that ...