How to use configure method of org.openqa.selenium.grid.commands.CompletionCommand class

Well, I do need to switch drivers from time to time, so I did this:

I initialize selenium related stuff in my own Class - called by name of the application and the driver is approached by the getters. When calling my class constructor, I use enum type of driver to initialize with:

 private WebDriver driver;
 public TestUI(Environment.DriverToUse drv){
   switch (drv){
        case CHROME:{
            ChromeDriverService service = ChromeDriverService.createDefaultService();
            File file = new File(TestUI.class.getResource("/chromedriver.exe").toURI());
            System.setProperty(ChromeDriverService.CHROME_DRIVER_EXE_PROPERTY, file.getAbsolutePath());                
            ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
            options.addArguments("--start-maximized");
            driver = new ChromeDriver(service,options);
            driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
            break;
        }
        case FIREFOX:{
            FirefoxProfile ffProfile = new FirefoxProfile();
            ffProfile.setPreference("browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled", false);
            driver = new FirefoxDriver(ffProfile);
            driver.manage().window().setPosition(new Point(0, 0));
            java.awt.Dimension screenSize = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize();
            Dimension dim = new Dimension((int) screenSize.getWidth(), (int) screenSize.getHeight());
            driver.manage().window().setSize(dim);
            driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
            break;

        }    

public WebDriver getDriver(){
 return driver;
}

of course my Environment class looks like this

public class Environment {
public enum DriverToUse {FIREFOX, CHROME};
// .. and some other stuff, because I need to test on different environments, so I store here Environment URL for example

And my test class looks something like this

@Before
public static final Environment.DriverToUse USED_DRIVER = Environment.DriverToUse.FIREFOX;

@Test
public void testVersionNumber() throws Exception{

    TestUI testUI= new TestUI(USED_DRIVER);
    WebElement version = testUI.getDriver().findElement(By.id("the Id of element"));
    version.click();
    //...
}

I also got the same exception:

I tried the following steps:

1. In Eclipse> Project > Clean. (The Exception remained)

2. I ran another project(The testng.xml ran successfully)

After running another project, I ran the project in which I was getting the Exception, and fortunately it worked for me, with no errors.

Its not really possible to perform a 'mouse hover' action, instead you need to chain all of the actions that you want to achieve in one go. So move to the element that reveals the others, then during the same chain, move to the now revealed element and click on it.

When using Action Chains you have to remember to 'do it like a user would'.

Actions action = new Actions(webdriver);
WebElement we = webdriver.findElement(By.xpath("html/body/div[13]/ul/li[4]/a"));
action.moveToElement(we).moveToElement(webdriver.findElement(By.xpath("/expression-here"))).click().build().perform();

You can redirect the output to a file or just discard it:

            // redirect console output from chromedriver to the file chromedriver_log.txt in the target folder
            DriverService.Builder<ChromeDriverService, ChromeDriverService.Builder> serviceBuilder = new ChromeDriverService.Builder();
            ChromeDriverService chromeDriverService = serviceBuilder.build();
            chromeDriverService.sendOutputTo(new FileOutputStream("target/chromedriver_log.txt", true));

            webDriver = new ChromeDriver(chromeDriverService, options);

If you want to just discard the output then use NullOutputStream.NULL_OUTPUT_STREAM insted off new FileOutputStream("target/chromedriver_log.txt", true)

You can use Actions class to perform this.

Actions act = new Actions(driver);
WebElement onElement = Your element on which action has to be performed;
act.contextClick(onElement).perform();
act.sendKeys("w").perform();  // If you want the link to open in new tab then use T instead of w

Hope this helps. Happy coding.

I need to click the link who's href has substring "long" in it. How can I do this?

With the beauty of CSS selectors.

your statement would be...

driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("a[href*='long']")).click();

This means, in english,

Find me any 'a' elements, that have the href attribute, and that attribute contains 'long'

You can find a useful article about formulating your own selectors for automation effectively, as well as a list of all the other equality operators. contains, starts with, etc... You can find that at: http://ddavison.io/css/2014/02/18/effective-css-selectors.html

You are absolutely right that incidental and often changing details in the produced scripts is the biggest problem of record-and-playback automation. You can obviously remove the details from the scripts after recording, but in my opinion it's better to build reusable libraries and code scripts manually from the start.

A good alternative for coding scripts using "real" programming languages is using some higher level automation framework such as Robot Framework that you mentioned. As you speculated, Robot's reusable keywords and also variables make extracting details away from tests very easy. The test cases in SeleniumLibrary's demo illustrates this very well and the demo also shows how to use Selenium through Robot.

You also asked about Sikuli. I've never used it myself but it sure looks interesting. You might be interested on this great how-to that explains how to use it through Robot Framework.

Hinted by this Chromedriver ticket (about the silent option), I looked in the source of ChromeDriverService.java, and found a reference to "webdriver.chrome.logfile".

After adding -Dwebdriver.chrome.logfile="/dev/null" to my java command, the logs became readable again: The usless ChromeDriver logs were gone, while theSystem.out.println calls and exceptions are still shown in the console.

I start java with the following parameters (Linux / Mac):

DIR=path/to/dir/containing/selenium/and/stuff
cd "$DIR" && java -cp "$DIR\
:$DIR/output\
:$DIR/bin/selenium-server-standalone-2.33.0.jar" \
-Dwebdriver.chrome.driver="$DIR/bin/chromedriver" \
-Dwebdriver.chrome.args="--disable-logging" \
-Dwebdriver.chrome.logfile="/dev/null" \
AllTests

If you're on Windows:

set DIR=path\to\dir\containing\selenium\and\stuff
cd "%DIR%" && java -cp "%DIR%;%DIR%\output;%DIR%\bin\selenium-server-standalone-2.33.0.jar" ^
-Dwebdriver.chrome.driver="%DIR%\bin\chromedriver.exe" ^
-Dwebdriver.chrome.args="--disable-logging" ^
-Dwebdriver.chrome.logfile=NUL ^
AllTests

Explanation for the composition of my classpath (-cp): My tests are located in a directory at "$DIR/output". The Selenium jar file is placed in "$DIR/bin/selenium-server-standalone-2.33.0.jar". "AllTests" is the name of my class containing public static void main(String[] args) - this launches my tests.

The other parameters are self-explanatory, adjust it to your needs. For convenience (used in a shell/batch script), I've declared the common directory in a variable DIR.

For sure you can. We use Selenium a lot as an assistant in getting some datas from websites.

When you have a process involving multiple steps, including opening website, login, choosing 54 parameters and need only 1 human interaction (resolving a captcha, for example), Selenium can automate those boring tasks and let the user concentrate on the one which is important.

What we do here, is to make a Swing dialog with an input field to get what the user want to enter, then the actual form submission is performed by Selenium. You can do the same thing with links, and you can ask the user to select a link to click on, and perform the actual click with webdriver.

The ExplicitWait method of Amith is also a good one. You can focus on what you expect after the user has clicked, and wait until this condition is realized