clear() or sendKeys('') not working on input types: date, time, datetime-local, month, or week

[benlesh]

This directly relates to the documentation tests on a pull request on the Angular.js project: angular/angular.js#5864

For now I'm going to work around it, I guess. But the issue seems to be that due to the custom controls in browsers like Chrome, protractor simply doesn't know what to do to interact with them in order to clear them. It's sort of late, and I haven't dug any further into than that for now.

I did, however see a few StackOverflow questions that seemed to relate, although none of the workarounds I found there worked.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15360362/clear-date-input-fails-on-chromewebdriver

Also possibly related?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21295314/how-to-set-html5-type-date-input-fields-e-g-in-chrome-using-selenium-protra

[benlesh]

FYI... I've opened a related issue in Angular here, that shows the workaround:

angular/angular.js#6523

The basics of it are:

1. use executeScript to set the value programmatically.
2. If you're using Angular, you need to trigger validation manually by calling $setViewValue.
3. Likewise if you're not using Angular, you'll need to call any event handlers you care about (e.g. "change", "keydown", etc) manually.

[juliemr]

This is a webdriver thing so I'm labeling as 'external bug', but it's definitely something we should work with webdriver implementations to fix. Related: #510, #301

[benlesh]

So, I'm thinking that maybe for now a nice workaround would be to have a protractor method that would do the work of sending an executeScript to force an update to the input, and make sure validation has been called. I'm not entirely sure how this would fit into your API, but I'm willing to implement it, since the workaround is fresh in my head. Some sort of: element.forceValue("new value"); or protractor.forceValue(element, "new value") type thing, as a helper method. Thoughts?

[juliemr]

Yeah, this seems like a pretty reasonable shim. What about:

element(<selector>).setValue("new value")?

If you'd like to put together a PR, I'd be happy to work with you on one! You'll want to add it to the wrapper around WebElement here: https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/master/lib/protractor.js#L557

and tests should go hereish: https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/master/spec/basic/findelements_spec.js#L566

[benlesh]

👍 I'll try to crank something out sometime this week. At the very least it would really clean up the e2e tests in the input[date], input[time] type docs for my other PR.

[ghristov]

Well i will comment here as well but i think my problem is not really related to this issues however i received reference to this issue after i had written my problem on another one.

So i will describe it in a brief (will try in understandable) way.
I have a form which has a button. So far nothing new. When i click the button it gets the created object and send it to a function. After that it clears the model ( create new empty object).

When i'm doing testing with protractor i specify my input field, sendKeys work fine with me but when i get the button and click it and after that verify the values of the fields, they are again with the values of the previously created object. That means the model hasn't been updated at all.

        element(by.model('unknown.readKey')).sendKeys('readKey 1');
        element(by.model('unknown.writeKey')).sendKeys('writeKey 1');

        element(by.id('configure')).click().then(function(){
            ptor.waitForAngular();
            expect(element(by.model('unknown.readKey')).getAttribute('value')).toBe('');
            expect(element(by.model('unknown.writeKey')).getAttribute('value')).toBe('');
        });

[benlesh]

FYI: @juliemr I haven't forgotten about this. I had a... sudden career change... and I'm in the process of moving to Silicon Valley from Pittsburgh. I'll look into adding an extension method (or two?) after I'm moved out there.