Selenium WebDriver

Webdriver is a tool used in web application development to automate testing across multiple types of browsers. Since browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge all have a tendency to display web apps and websites differently, developers need a efficient way to test accurately at scale. Selenium is a popular webdriver which automates the browser and helps us in automating web application testing across different browsers. Selenium API has provided many classes and interfaces to work with different types of browsers and HTML elements.

Selenium WebDriver is an interface that defines a set of methods. However, implementation is provided by the browser specific classes. Some of the implementation classes are AndroidDriver, ChromeDriver, FirefoxDriver, InternetExplorerDriver, IPhoneDriver, SafariDriver etc. The WebDriver main functionality is to control the browser. Kinda like a remote control. It even helps us to select the HTML page elements and perform operations on them such as click, filling a form fields etc.

If we want to execute your test cases in a Firefox browser we have to use FirefoxDriver class. Similarly, if we want to execute the test cases in the Chrome browser we have to use ChromeDriver class.

SearchContext is the topmost interface in Selenium API which has two methods - findElement() and findElements(). Selenium WebDriver interface has many abstract methods like get(String url), quit(), close(), getWindowHandle(), getWindowHandles(), getTitle() etc. WebDriver has nested interfaces like Window, Navigation, Timeouts etc. These nested interfaces are used to perform operations like back(), forward() etc.

The major implementation classes of WebDriver interface are ChromeDriver, EdgeDriver, FirefoxDriver, InternetExplorerDriver etc. Each driver class corresponds to a browser. We simply create the object of the driver classes and work with them.

Selenium WebElement represents an HTML element. We can get an instance of WebElement using findElement() method and then perform specific actions such as click, submit etc. Some of the commonly used WebElement methods are:

Let’s look at a simple example of using Selenium WebDriver to invoke Firefox browser and print the title of a website.

package com.journaldev.selenium.firefox;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;

public class GeckoDriverExample {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		//specify the location of GeckoDriver for Firefox browser automation
		System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "geckodriver");
		WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
		driver.get("https://journaldev.com");
		String PageTitle = driver.getTitle();
		System.out.println("Page Title is:" + PageTitle);
		driver.close();
	}
}

Output:

1551941763563	mozrunner::runner	INFO	Running command: "/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin" "-marionette" "-foreground" "-no-remote" "-profile" "/var/folders/1t/sx2jbcl534z88byy78_36ykr0000gn/T/rust_mozprofile.t6ZyMHsrf2bh"
1551941764296	addons.webextension.screenshots@mozilla.org	WARN	Loading extension 'screenshots@mozilla.org': Reading manifest: Invalid host permission: resource://pdf.js/
1551941764297	addons.webextension.screenshots@mozilla.org	WARN	Loading extension 'screenshots@mozilla.org': Reading manifest: Invalid host permission: about:reader*
Can't find symbol 'GetGraphicsResetStatus'.
1551941765794	Marionette	INFO	Listening on port 61417
1551941765818	Marionette	WARN	TLS certificate errors will be ignored for this session
Mar 07, 2019 12:26:05 PM org.openqa.selenium.remote.ProtocolHandshake createSession
INFO: Detected dialect: W3C
Page Title is:JournalDev - Java, Java EE, Android, Python, Web Development Tutorials
1551941814652	Marionette	INFO	Stopped listening on port 61417

You can checkout more Selenium examples from our GitHub Repository.

Reference: WebDriver GitHub Code