How to use getDefaultTimeout method of org.openqa.selenium.firefox.xpi.XpiDriverService.Builder class

Using Geb at our workplace has been a life-saver. I can't imagine this many people (with absolutely no programming background) picking up Selenium in as short a time span.

I've been very successful creating mavenized geb projects that we have running on Jenkins for our CI. It does have a few limitations like not having the drag and drop ability right out of the box. However, you are always free to use the Selenium APIs whenever the need arises. Also, to the commenter about it lacking the support for phantomJS - says who? You can use absolutely any driver that selenium supports. Check this link for details.

Using an explicit wait worked for me (tried both chrome and firefox):

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 10);
WebElement element = wait.until(
    ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.id("ctl62_txtSearchLastName"))
);

element.sendKeys("test");

Resulted into:

Recently Selenium has launched Selenium 3 and if you are trying to use Firefox latest version then you have to use GeckoDriver:

System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver","G:\\Selenium\\Firefox driver\\geckodriver.exe");
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

You can check full documentation from here

You want to specify that like the following:

//td[contains(@class,'deletion') or contains(@class,'addition')]

or

//td[contains(@class,'blob-code blob-code-addition') or contains(@class,'blob-code blob-code-deletion')]

If you want to do a tag independent search then you can simply use

//*[contains(@class,'blob-code blob-code-addition') or contains(@class,'blob-code blob-code-deletion')]

From your answer it looks like you are trying to concatenate two different xpaths

However, contians() is not mandatory here. You also can do without this

//*[(@class='blob-code blob-code-addition') or (@class='blob-code blob-code-deletion')]

Use findElements instead of findElement.

findElements will return an empty list if no matching elements are found instead of an exception.

To check that an element is present, you could try this

Boolean isPresent = driver.findElements(By.yourLocator).size() > 0

This will return true if at least one element is found and false if it does not exist.

The official documentation recommends this method:

findElement should not be used to look for non-present elements, use findElements(By) and assert zero length response instead.

I feel like your misunderstanding the purposes of WebDriver, Grid and a multi-threaded environment.

Selenium WebDriver is just a test framework that kicks off tests onto a browser. It uses drivers such as geckodriver, and chromedriver to open (and close) browser instances and then hits those instances with actions.

Selenium Grid is a stand-alone server that will run your WebDriver tests remotely on a node and reports back. So if you wanted to use another machines resources to run your test-suite you would be able to do so. It also allows you to combine multiple machines resources by assigning each a node and Selenium Grid will distribute your tests evenly.

As far as your questions about multi-threading,

Is it recommended to use Grid over Selenium WebDriver in a multithreaded environment?

Grid is just a remote-runner of WebDriver. WebDriver is the test-framework. I assume your goal is to reduce your test-suite's run-time by running tests in parallel? Parallel testing can be done on your local machine using WebDriver or can be configured on a Selenium Grid. In my experience, I have gotten more lucky on my local machine than on Grid but both essentially face the same problem. The main danger for parallel testing using WebDriver is thread-safety. JUnit 4.7 onwards and Test-NG RELEASE allow for parallel testing. I highly suggest using Test-NG instead of JUnit for this purpose.

To prevent concurrency issues, your main goal will be to make all your shared resources isolated within each thread. A secondary goal is to limit the scope of all variables to its method. This can be done using a static instance of ThreadLocal It is also really useful to force the initializing of driver instances to be frozen in synchronized methods.

Creating Resources

public class DriverFactory {

    private static String grid = "http://localhost:4444/wd/hub";
    public static ThreadLocal<WebDriver> drivers = new ThreadLocal<WebDriver>();

    public static synchronized void newDriver() {
        ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions(); // Assuming Chrome use
            options.addArguments("--start-maximized");

        // USE THIS FOR LOCAL
        // tlDriver.set(new ChromeDriver(options));

        // USE THIS FOR GRID
        try {
            drivers.set(new RemoteWebDriver(new URL(grid),options));
        } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

    public static synchronized WebDriver getDriver() {
        return drivers.get();
    }
}

Test Class

public class GoogleTest {
    @BeforeMethod
    public void setup() {
         DriverFactory.newDriver();
    }

    @Test
    public void test1() {
        WebDriver driver = DriverFactory.getDriver();
        driver.navigate().to("https:\\www.google.com");
        Assert.assertEquals(driver.getTitle(), "Google");
    }

    @Test
    public void test2() {
        WebDriver driver = DriverFactory.getDriver();
        driver.navigate().to("https:\\www.google.com");
        Assert.assertEquals(driver.getTitle(), "Google");
    }


    @AfterMethod
    public void tearDown() {
        WebDriver driver = DriverFactory.getDriver();
        driver.quit();
    }
}

TestNG.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE suite SYSTEM "http://testng.org/testng-1.0.dtd">
<!-- thread-count should be = to maxSessions on your Grid -->
<suite name="Whatever" parallel="methods" thread-count="5">
  <test name="Sample">
    <classes>
      <class name="GoogleTest"/>
    </classes>
  </test>
</suite>

Source: Making your Tests Thread-Safe, Full Guide
Versions Used: TestNG 6.14.3, Selenium 3.11, Selenium Grid 3.14.3

Also, would Selenium Grid take responsibility of cleaning any stale browser instances in its nodes (out of the box)?

Selenium Grid has timeout and a browserTimeout features to free up nodes and close browser instances. Although in my experience I would implore you to control any expected timeouts in your test-cases and have WebDriver close the browser instance, not Selenium Grid. You really want to prevent this from happening and eliminate all causes of un-expected hanging. Test-suites are designed to be quick feedback and are only useful if failures are indicative of an actual failure, not just a dirty test-suite. Also stale nodes/browsers can force you to have to constantly reset your grid + nodes which is a major detriment.

You can try this one too as CSS Selector

driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("input[type='button'][value='Open device access']")).click();

or

driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("input[type='button']")).click();

You can get immediate parent using ..

By.xpath("//input[contains(@id,'custProglabel')]/..")

As a side note, xpath should start with lower case 'x'.

Maybe http://popperfw.org is interesting for you. It is a much more flexible implementation of the page object pattern than the default implementation from selenium and it comes with direct support for "unit" testing your created PageObjects => it tests if your PageObjects match on your testet pages

http://popperfw.org/unitTest.html