Selenium Harness

Overview

Selenium WebDriver is a web browser automation tool. The WebDriver API allows access to Selenium's functionality through programming languages such as Python, Ruby, and Java. Selenium Harness is a homegrown framework using the Python WebDriver bindings to take advantage of Selenium's native functionality, and additionally:

• extend and customize Selenium's commands, allowing functionality beyond the web browser (e.g., FTP access, sending e-mail, accessing databases or the filesystem)
• simplify the automation process using syntax similar to Selenium IDE's output
• optimize Selenium's native commands and expedite the automation process (e.g. automatically waiting for an element to exist and become visible before attempting user interaction)
• improve performance by executing multiple test suites concurrently
• provide detailed logging of test results
• integrate with JIRA Test Cases

Dependencies

The following packages are required and can be installed via Pip:

• BeautifulSoup4
• selenium

Execution

To run the Selenium Python WebDriver without any parameters:

$ python run.py

Parameter	Description	Default
-h, --help	Show the help message and exit.
-s SUITE, --suite SUITE	Required SUITE specifies the test suite or the test suite directory. If a directory is specified, every file within the directory will be executed as a test suite.
-b BASE, --base BASE	BASE specifies the base URL to use. If not specified, the program will scan for the base.url file, starting with the suite directory and traversing upwards.
-t TIER, --tier TIER	TIER specifies the development tier to use, e.g. qa or dev. The tier may be substituted in the default base URL or utilized by custom scripts, for example when accessing XML files organized by development tier on an FTP server.	qa
-d, --debug	Debug mode; provides verbose output.
-x, --xml	Loads suite file data from an XML file. Used in conjunction with the -s parameter, allowing for JIRA filter output to drive automation.

Actions

UI maps specify a list of actions to be run for a particular page. Actions are described below:

Action	Description	Format
action_new	Create a new Action Chain	action_new
action_move_to_element	Adds to the current Action Chain, moving the mouse to the specified element	action_move_to_element|selector|element
action_click	Adds a mouse click the current Action Chain	action_click
action_keys	Adds to the current Action Chain, sending a sequence of special keys (up, down, left, right)	action_keys|key1,key2,key3
action_perform	Performs the Action Chain	action_perform
base_url	Change the base URL. The tier parameter can be used in the URL. For example, if the parameter --tier dev is used, base_url|http://%(tier)host.com evaluates to the base URL http://devhost.com.	base_url|URL
clear	Clear an input's text	clear|selector|element
clear_type	Clears an input's text then sends keys to the element	type_var|selector|element|variable
click	Click on an element	click|selector|element
click_all	Click all elements	click|selector|element
delay	Delay a specified number of milliseconds	delay|milliseconds
exec	Evaluate arbitrary Python code with access to store variables	exec|code
find_frame	Search through all iframes for target element, switching to frame	find_frame|selector|element
keys	Send a sequence of special keys (up, down, left, right) to a target	keys|selector|element|key1,key2,key3
log	Output a string	log|string
log_var	Output a variable's value	log_var|variable
open	Open a URL (appended to a base URL)	open|URL
random_ssn	Generates a random Social Security Number, saving it to variable	random_ssn|variable
select	Select an option from a select box element by visible text	select|selector|element|option
select_by_value	Select an option from a select box element by value	select|selector|element|option
set_window_size	Set the browser's window size, in pixels	set_window_size|width|height
store_attribute	Store an element's attribute into a variable	store_text|selector|element|attribute|variable
store_text	Store an element's text into a variable	store_text|selector|element|variable
switch_to_default	Switch to the top frame (frame 0)	switch_to_default
switch_to_frame	Switch to a frame by name or number	switch_to_frame|frame
type	Send keys to an element	type|selector|element|keys
type_var	Send the value of a variable to an element	type_var|selector|element|variable
verify_text	Verify that text exists within an element	verify_text|selector|element|text

Element and Selector

The Selenium specific parameters, element and selector, mirror the output of Selenium's IDE.

selector Specifies the method used to select an element. Selector must be one of the following values:

• id
• css
• xpath element Describes the element to target using the specified selector.

Examples

# sends the keys "03032022" to an element with the ID "expirationDate":
type|id|expirationDate|03032022

# clicks on a button, located using xpath selector:
click|xpath|//input[@value='Continue']

# clicks on a button, located using the css selector:
click|css|#accord-2 > div.accord-content.padded > div.accord-controls.padded > input.accord-button-next

# stores the value of an input into a variable:
store_attribute|id|__o3id0|value|REFERENCE_NUMBER

# use an Action Chain to click on an element and send arrow keys:
action_new
action_move_to_element|xpath|/html/body/div/span/ span
action_click
action_keys|down,down,down,return
action_perform

For more information, check out Locating UI Elements section in the WebDriver documentation.

Actions to Consider Adding

• open_base: Open a URL without appending to the base URL
• is_hidden
• is_visible
• assert: Assert the return value of a boolean action