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Selenic is a collection of Python code which is used for testing browser-based software through Selenium. It is currently tailored for the projects at Mangalam Research but there is nothing preventing it from being used for other projects.

If you want to run tests in Chrome, you only need chromedriver. Chromedriver is here. The documentation for its use is here.

Please look at the examples in the examples subdirectory and read the source code to know how this all works.

Selenium Issues

Native Events

It is very often the case that tests which work with native events fail when using synthetic events. Keep this in mind.

Misc

  • Selenium 2.35.0: ActionChains.send_keys is broken. Selenic patches ActionChains to fix this problem.
  • Selenium 2.35.0: It is impossible to know whether a Firefox instance is able to handle native events or not. Firefox 22 with 2.35.0 is known to handle native events.
  • Selenium <= 2.40.0: Handling of colon in locators that use class names in IE is completely broken. Selenic attempts to fix the issue. See below for some notes.

Chromedriver and ActionChains.move_to_element

The Changelog for Chromedriver 2.14 says:

Getting the location of an element, and moving the mouse to an element, now uses the center of the first ClientRect, rather than the center of the bounding box.

This is in direct violation of the specifications of move_to_element. The issue has been reported here but the people reponsible are in no hurry to fix it. (At the time of writing, it's been 9 months between the submission of the issue.)

If Selenic is asked to create a driver for Chrome and it detects a Chromedriver version greater than 2.13, it patches ActionChains so that when an ActionChains object is created for a driver that needs the patch, then move_to_element on the new instance is patched to get the element's center with getBoundingClientRect. Upshots:

  1. Selenic won't patch ActionChains at all unless it is tasked with creating a driver that will work with a Chromedriver version greater than 2.13.
  2. Once Selenic has patched ActionChains it is patched for good. This means that if if a driver instance for IE is then created it will use the patched ActionChains. However, the new ActionChains constructor checks whether the driver for which it creates a new instance needs the move_to_element patch and patches accordingly.

Colons in Class Names in IE

This is known to occur with Selenium <= 2.40.0. The normal way to escape colons that appear as part of class names is to put a backslash in front of the colon. This works without issue in Firefox and Chrome but in IE there's a bug. The solution is to double up on the backslashes. Where "foo\\:bar" would work everywhere else, for IE we need "foo\\\\:bar". But there's a problem if we want our code to work on multiple platforms.

Selenic attempts to work around the issue depending on how COLON_HANDLING is set:

  • Not set, or set to NONE: Selenic will check what broswer you are using and what version of Selenium you are using. If it determines that the combination is at risk for colons, it will act as if the setting was True, otherwise it will act as if the setting was False.
  • True: turn on the workaround.
  • False: turn off the workaround.

The workaround itself is pretty simple. Selenic patches the driver created from selenic.config.Config and it patches WebElement so that every time Selenium searches for elements by class name, it searches instead by a CSS selector which is equivalent.

Debugging the Firefox Driver

  1. Download the version of Selenium that corresponds to whatever API you are using.

  2. Unzip.

  3. Edit javascript/firefox-driver/build.desc to eliminate the platform binaries you do not need. These look like paths of the form platform/Linux.... Some are for Windows. (This saves a huge amount of build time and space).

  4. Issue:

    $ bash ./go //javascript/firefox-driver:webdriver