Driver Initialization
Which browser should you use in your automation?
Driver Params
Opening new applications
Browser navigation
getTittle
getCurrentUrl
navigate
Window management
Get window handle
getWindowHandle
getWindowHandles
Switching windows or tabs
switchToWindow
Working with UI Elements
Inspector
Find elements

This page describes only Browser Driver specific features and methods which may be different in other drivers.

Implementation which is common for all drivers is described in Drivers page. Please, read it before.

Before delving into browser automation, consider the taskyou are automating. Does the web application you are working with allow API access? APIs do not change as often as the graphical user interfaces. Automating using APIs means your automation scripts don't break as easily.

Sometimes there is no API provided, or the API is missing some functionality to complete the process. In these cases, you need to interact with the application's user interface; filling and submitting forms, pressing buttons, clicking on elements, scraping content, and many other interactions. So BrowserDriver is what you need.

BrowserDriver is used to automate web browser actions.

This driver is based on the Selenium WebDriver which drives a browser natively, as a user would. In addition to Selenium WebDriver, EasyRPA BrowserDriver brings additional useful methods.

Driver Initialization

You can initialize the driver in your automation process task by the following way:

@Driver(param = {@DriverParameter(key = DriverParams.Browser.SELENIUM_NODE_CAPABILITIES, initializerName = DriverParams.BrowserCapabilities.CHROME) })
private BrowserDriver browserDriver;

Please notice that we pass DriverParams.BrowserCapabilities.CHROME name as a reference to a capability class initializer in the above example, so we expect that selenium grid will provide the chrome node for us. If we want to use the browser other than Chrome, we need to pass the corresponding capability initializer instead.

All the supported browsers are listed in the table below

Target Browser	Capability Initializer
Chrome	DriverParams.BrowserCapabilities.CHROME
Edge	DriverParams.BrowserCapabilities.EDGE
Firefox	DriverParams.BrowserCapabilities.FIREFOX
Internet Explorer	DriverParams.BrowserCapabilities.IE
Opera	DriverParams.BrowserCapabilities.OPERA
Safari	DriverParams.BrowserCapabilities.SAFARI

Which browser should you use in your automation?

You can choose the browser you prefer. Our suggestion is to use Google Chrome unless the application you are trying to automate works only with a specific browser. Different browsers might behave in different ways. A robot could work with Chrome, but not Safari or Internet Explorer.

Driver Params

Param name	Measure	Default Value	Description
DriverParams.Browser.SELENIUM_HUB_URL	URL	http://localhost:4444/wd/hub	Selenium Hub URL. Defines how browser driver should interact with selenium. Now could be 2 modes: remote, the parameter should point to a selenium HUB/NODE URL. In this case a selenium HUB/NODE should be started. See Node Features - SELENIUM_HUB, SELENIUM_NODE, SELENIUM_STANDALONE local, the parameter should be "local" or null (absent). In this case drivers uses web drivers directly, they should be present on local system and Java environment variable should contain path for them. F.e. for chrome it is: -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=d:\chromedriver.exe See Node Features - SELENIUM_DIRECT
DriverParams.Browser.SELENIUM_NODE_CAPABILITIES	org.openqa.selenium.Capabilities	null	Used to set properties of browsers to perform browser automation of web applications. It stores the capabilities as key-value pairs and these capabilities are used to set browser properties like browser name, browser version, path of browser driver in the system, etc. to determine the behavior of browser at run time. E.g. you can read about Chrome browser capabilities by the following link.
DriverParams.Browser.PAGE_LOAD_TIMEOUT_SECONDS	seconds	1800	Limits the time that the script allots for a web page to be displayed. If the page loads within the time then the script continues. If the page does not load within the timeout the script will be stopped by a TimeoutException.
DriverParams.Browser.IMPLICITLY_WAIT_TIMEOUT_SECONDS	seconds	0	This timeout is used to specify the amount of time the driver should wait while searching for an element if it is not immediately present.
DriverParams.All.EXPLICITLY_WAIT_TIMEOUT_SECONDS	seconds	5	Wait functions default timeout in seconds.
DriverParams.All.EXPLICITLY_WAIT_POLLING_INTERVAL_MILLISECONDS	milliseconds	500	Wait functions default pooling interval in milliseconds.

Bellow is an example of how to put custom Chrome options capabilities and change default driver params:

@Driver(param = {
		@DriverParameter(key = DriverParams.Browser.SELENIUM_NODE_CAPABILITIES, initializer = ChromeInitializer.class),
		@DriverParameter(key = DriverParams.Browser.PAGE_LOAD_TIMEOUT_SECONDS, direct = "20"),
		@DriverParameter(key = DriverParams.Browser.IMPLICITLY_WAIT_TIMEOUT_SECONDS, direct = "5")
})
private BrowserDriver browserDriver;

private static final String filePath = System.getProperty("user.home") + "\\Downloads";

public static final class ChromeInitializer implements Supplier<Capabilities> {

	@Override
	public Capabilities get() {
		ChromeOptions chromeOptions = new ChromeOptions();

		HashMap<String, Object> chromePrefs = new HashMap<>();
		chromePrefs.put("profile.default_content_settings.popups", 0);
		chromePrefs.put("download.default_directory", filePath);

		chromeOptions.setExperimentalOption("prefs", chromePrefs);
		return chromeOptions;
	}
}

The following dependency need to be added into the project because we are using ChromeOptions:

		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
			<artifactId>selenium-chrome-driver</artifactId>
			<version>${selenium.version}</version>
			<scope>provided</scope>
		</dependency>

Opening new applications

The first thing you will want to do after launching a browser is to open your website. This can be achieved in a single line:

browserDriver.get("https://selenium.dev");

Browser navigation

getTittle

You can read the current application title (or browser title).

public String getTitle()

getCurrentUrl

You can read the current URL from the browser’s address bar using this method.

public String getCurrentUrl()

navigate

This method returns an abstraction (Navigation object) which contains the helpful methods to perform navigation in Browser.

public Navigation navigate()

driver.navigate().to("https://selenium.dev"); //longer way of driver.get("https://selenium.dev")
driver.navigate().back();
driver.navigate().forward();
driver.navigate().refresh();

Window management

Get window handle

WebDriver does not make the distinction between windows and tabs. If your site opens a new tab or window, Selenium will let you work with it using a window handle. Each window has a unique identifier which remains persistent in a single session. You can get the window handle of the current window by using:

getWindowHandle

Each window has a unique identifier which remains persistent in a single session. You can get the window handle of the current window by using this method.

public String getWindowHandle()

getWindowHandles

Return a set of window handles which can be used to iterate over all open windows available for driver so you can use handle to switch to window by passing them to "switch to window" methods.

public Set<String> getWindowHandles()

Switching windows or tabs

Browser driver supports switching to window by name or window handle.

switchToWindow

Switch the focus of future commands for this driver to the window with the given name/handle.

public void switchToWindow(String windowSearch)

Also it supports methods which help you to wait until window appears and switch to it only after that. It returns "true" if it switched successfully:

public boolean waitAndSwitchToWindow(String windowSearch, int... timeouts)
public boolean waitAndSwitchToWindow(String windowSearch, BrowserSearch by, int... timeouts)
public boolean waitAndSwitchToWindow(String windowSearch, BrowserSearch by, boolean optional, int... timeouts)

Working with UI Elements

Inspector

UI Elements represents a DOM elements. Browser Driver API provides built-in methods to find the elements which are based on different properties like ID, Name, Class, XPath, CSS Selectors, link Text, etc. To construct a selector you can use built-in browser DOM inspector.

E.g. you can read about Chrome browser inspector by the following link.

Find elements

Please, check the table which locators are supported by BrowserDriver:

Selector type
BrowserSearch.id
BrowserSearch.name
BrowserSearch.xpath
BrowserSearch.cssSelector
BrowserSearch.className
BrowserSearch.tagName
BrowserSearch.linkText
BrowserSearch.partialLinkText

Bellow an example of how to find element by name:

BrowserElement webElement = browserDriver.findElement(BrowserSearch.name("q"));

You can read more information of how to work with selenium selectors:

XPath Tutorial

CSS selectors

Locators Tutorial

Selenium documentation