How to use afterImplicitlyWait method of org.openqa.selenium.support.events.Interface WebDriverListener class

What you're describing is called a Sandbox DB. For every new deploy you'll have to provide/populate this DB with the data you need and after tests are done, to drop it.

have several versions/snapshots of DB state

This is what a Fresh Fixture pattern and Prebuilt Fixture pattern will help you with. Also you could look at the Fixture Teardown patterns.

Here you can find some considerations when dealing with such big-data-sandbox-strategies. Like scheduling, master data repository and monitoring.

To successfully manage all that - a CI server have to be put to work. Since you've tagged JAVA, a good options are:

• Jenkins and Database plugin
• Bamboo
• Hudson

WebDriver and Selenium are perfectly suited for production environnement. I use them quite extensively for 2 years now on a multi-machines/multi-datacenters distributed grid and had absolutely no performance nor stability problems we couldn't have coped with.

Our preferred driver is the Firefox one (heavier than HTMLUnit, and harder to configure), and we had to tweak the grid to understand how many instances we can run. Our maximum for stability was 1 per core

Our selenium/webdriver instances have run 24/7 for 2 years now (1 year with selenium 1, and the other migrating selenium 2/ WebDriver incrementally) and with an appropriate monitoring (you should monitor Memory Usage/CPU Usage) and a bunch of load testing, we had reached the good level where we have experienced several monthes without restarting a process

We've used HTMLUnit extensively too, and are equally satisfied with this library

The essential point of my post is : YES, these library are production-ready. But, as all production software, you'll have to benchmark their use to find the appropriate configuration for the optimal stability. I recommend you to use the Selenium Grid in production, which is a great way to parallelize process

This is a older thread, but still want to provide input for those who are stuck up at this. You have to make sure that the class file names you are creating are ending with "Test" string. e.g. AppTest, TempTest are all valid class file names, but AppCheck, TempTest1 are invalid name; maven will not detect these files for execution.

If there has been any changes to the page after you have initially found the element the webdriver reference will now contain a stale reference. As the page has changed, the element will no longer be where webdriver expects it to be.

To solve your issue, try finding the element each time you need to use it - writing a small method that you can call as and when is a good idea.

import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.WebDriverWait

public void clickAnElementByLinkText(String linkText) {
    wait.until(ExpectedConditions.presenceOfElementLocated(By.linkText(linkText)));
    driver.findElement(By.linkText(linkText)).click();
}

Then within your code you'd only need to:

clickAnElementByLinkText("Logout");

So each time it will find the element and click on it, as such even if the page changes as it is 'refreshing' the reference to that element it all successfully click it.

If you are using Webdriver then the item you are looking for is Selected.

Often times in the render of the checkbox doesn't actually apply the attribute checked unless specified.

So what you would look for in Selenium Webdriver is this

isChecked = e.findElement(By.tagName("input")).Selected;

As there is no Selected in WebDriver Java API, the above code should be as follows:

isChecked = e.findElement(By.tagName("input")).isSelected();

Earlier, I was using IE11 with Selenium WebDriver 2.5.3 and IEDriver -2.53.0. I got the same issue. I changed the capabilities by setting some properties for IE programmatically and it worked. Here's the code snippet:

    DesiredCapabilities caps = DesiredCapabilities.internetExplorer();
    caps.setCapability(InternetExplorerDriver.INITIAL_BROWSER_URL, Configuration.getConfig("My URL"));
    caps.setCapability(InternetExplorerDriver.IGNORE_ZOOM_SETTING, true);

In my case, I have changed the tags from plugin to dependency like it is in the Maven Repository.

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>3.8.1</version>
</dependency>

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.

This popup:

with the error message as...

Error Loading Extension
Failed to load extension from: 'C:\Users\user_name\AppData\Local\Temp\scoped_dir6312_32763\internal'. Loading of unpacked extensions is disabled by the administrator.
OK

...implies that an extension has not been loaded as it is disabled by the administrator.

As per the discussion Failed to load extention from: ... Loading of unpacked extensions is disabled by the administrator ChromeDriver uses Chrome automation extension for automating various functions like window sizing, window positioning, etc.

The Failed to load extension.. popup means that this extension has not been loaded. If you manually close the popup, browser will act normally and ChromeDriver commands will continue to work as expected. But in this case if you try executing window resizing or window re-positioning commands, it will throw an error as unknown error: cannot get automation extension.

Background

Till ChromeDriver v2.28 whenever an organizations admin policy forbidden extensions, to bypass the restriction users have used the argument disable-extensions as follows:

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.addArguments("--disable-extensions");
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

and it worked perfecto.

ChromeDriver v2.28 onwards, whenever disable-extensions flag is passed by test, ChromeDriver implicitly passes disable-extensions-except flag which in turn loads Chrome automation extension. This extension helps Chromedriver to perform window sizing and window re-positioning operations.

So, if your organizational admin policy blocks extensions, display of popup Failed to load extension from: ... Loading of unpacked extensions is an expected behavior.

This issue had a dependency on Selenium support for headless.

Work around

As an alternative, you can set the useAutomationExtension capability to false as follows:

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.setExperimentalOption("useAutomationExtension", false);
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

This capability inturn will help to not load Chrome Automation extension and Failed to load extension popup would not appear. But you will not be able to perform any window resizing/positioning operations without the Chrome automation extension.

Now, Selenium support for headless being resolved ChromeDriver will no longer require this extension and you shouldn't have seen this error/popup.

Solution

The simplest solution would be to use the latest version of ChromeDriver and Chrome combination among either of the following:

• If you are using Chrome version 73, please download ChromeDriver 73.0.3683.20
• If you are using Chrome version 72, please download ChromeDriver 2.46 or ChromeDriver 72.0.3626.69
• If you are using Chrome version 71, please download ChromeDriver 2.46 or ChromeDriver 71.0.3578.137
• For older version of Chrome, please see this discussion.

Alternative

Some other alternatives are:

• Add the Registry Key ExtensionInstallWhitelist to whitelist
• Remove the Registry Key ExtensionInstallBlacklist containing a string key 1 with value *