Fr

Selenium WebDriver is a popular automated testing tool

for web applications. Python is one of the top programming
languages and when used with Selenium it can automate
and test web applications. Using Python's unittest module,
you can write test cases in Selenium. Over the years,
Selenium has become a very powerful testing platform and
many organizations are adopting Selenium WebDriver for
creating automated user interface tests.
The book's main aim is to cover the fundamentals related to
Python Selenium testing. You will learn how the Selenium
WebDriver Python API can be integrated with CI and Build
tools to allow tests to be run while building applications. This
book will guide you through using the Selenium WebDriver
Python client library as well as other tools from the Selenium
project. Towards the end of this book, you'll get to grips with
Selenium Grid, which is used for running tests in parallel
using nodes for cross-browser testing. It will also give you a
basic overview of the concepts, while helping you improve
your practical testing skills with Python and Selenium.

Who this book is written for

Create Selenium WebDriver tests using the

Python unittest module
Use Selenium WebDriver for cross-browser
testing
Build reliable and robust tests using implicit
and explicit waits
Set up and use Selenium Grid for
distributed run
Test web applications on mobile platforms
such as iOS and Android using Appium
Utilize various methods provided by Selenium
WebDriver to locate web elements and interact
with them
Capture screenshots and videos of the
test execution

$ 44.99 US
27.99 UK

community experience distilled

P U B L I S H I N G

Unmesh Gundecha

If you are a quality testing professional, or a software or

web application developer looking to create automation test
scripts for your web applications, with an interest in Python,
then this is the perfect guide for you. Python developers who
need to do Selenium testing need not learn Java, as they
can directly use Selenium for testing with this book.

What you will learn from this book

Learning Selenium Testing Tools with Python

Learning Selenium Testing

Tools with Python

ee

pl

C o m m u n i t y

E x p e r i e n c e

D i s t i l l e d

Learning Selenium Testing

Tools with Python
A practical guide on automated web testing with Selenium
using Python

Prices do not include

local sales tax or VAT
where applicable

Visit www.PacktPub.com for books, eBooks,

code, downloads, and PacktLib.

Sa
m

Unmesh Gundecha

In this package, you will find:

The author biography

A preview chapter from the book, Chapter 1 'Getting Started with Selenium
WebDriver and Python'
A synopsis of the books content
More information on Learning Selenium Testing Tools with Python

About the Author

Unmesh Gundecha has a Master's degree in Software Engineering and over 12 years of
experience in software development and testing. Unmesh has architected functional test
automation solutions using industry standards, in-house and custom test automation
frameworks along with leading commercial and open source test automation tools.
He has development experience in Microsoft technologies and Java. He is presently
working as a test solution architect with a multinational company in Pune, India.
His experience includes support to Ruby, Java, iOS, Android, and PHP projects as an
automated tester and software developer.
He authored Selenium Testing Tools Cookbook, Packt Publishing in November 2012.
I would like to thank Neha Nagwekar, acquisition editor, for giving
me an opportunity to write this book; Athira Laji, content
development editor; Harshal Ved, project coordinator, for constantly
supporting and encouraging me in completing this book; and the entire
team at Packt Publishing.
This book has benefited a lot from a great team of technical reviewers.
I'd like to thank each of them for volunteering their time reviewing the
drafts of this book and providing valuable feedback.
I would also like to thank my mentor and friend, Yuri Weinstein, for
his support and help during this project. Thanks to my friends and
colleagues at work for their constant encouragement and support in
writing this book.

Learning Selenium Testing Tools

with Python
Selenium is a set of tools for automating browsers. It is largely used for testing
applications, but its usages are not limited only to testing. It can also be used for
screen scraping and automating repetitive tasks in a browser window. Selenium
supports automation on all the major browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer,
Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera. Selenium WebDriver is now a part of W3C
standards and is supported by major browser vendors.
Selenium offers the following set of tools for automating interaction with browsers:

Selenium IDE: This is a Firefox add-in used to record and play back the
Selenium scripts with Firefox. It provides a graphical user interface to record
user actions using Firefox. It is a great tool to start learning and using Selenium,
but it can only be used with Firefox and other browsers are not supported.
However, it can convert the recorded scripts into various programming languages
supported by Selenium WebDriver, which supports running scripts on browsers
other than Firefox.

Selenium WebDriver: This is a programming interface for developing advanced

Selenium scripts using programming languages. We can also run tests on
multiple browsers that are supported by Selenium on multiple operating systems,
including Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. This makes Selenium a true crossbrowser testing tool. Selenium WebDriver offers client libraries in various
languages, including Java, C#, Python, Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript, and are more
into writing test scripts.

Selenium standalone server: This is also known as Selenium Grid and allows
remote and distributed execution of Selenium scripts created with WebDriver.
We can also use the grid feature of the standalone server to run tests in parallel,
including tests on mobile platforms such as Android or Apple iOS for iPhone
and iPad.

As the title suggests, this book will introduce you to the Selenium WebDriver client
library for Python. You will learn how to use Selenium WebDriver in Python to automate
browsers for testing web applications. This book contains lessons right from setting up
Selenium to using the basic and advanced features of Selenium to create and run
automated scripts for testing web applications. This book assumes you have a basic idea
of programming using Python.

What This Book Covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with Selenium WebDriver and Python, starts with installing
Python and the Selenium WebDriver client library. We will select a Python editor or IDE
for Selenium script development. We will then create our first automation script for a
simple search workflow from the application under test. At the end of this chapter, we
will run the Selenium script on various browsers supported by Selenium.
Chapter 2, Writing Tests Using unittest, shows you how to use Selenium and the unittest
library to test web applications. We will convert the script into a unittest test case. We
will create few more tests using Selenium and unittest. We will create a TestSuite for a
group of tests. We will run these tests and analyze the results. At the end of this chapter,
you will learn how to produce test reports in the HTML format that you can distribute to
various stakeholders of the project.
Chapter 3, Finding Elements, introduces you to locators that are the keys to automate
different types of User Interface (UI) elements displayed on the web pages in the browser
window. Selenium uses locators to find elements on a page and then performs actions or
retrieves their properties for testing. You will learn various methods to locate elements,
including XPath and CSS. We will show you how to use these methods with examples on
the application under test.
Chapter 4, Using the Selenium Python API for Element Interaction, shows you how to
use the Selenium WebDriver client library to interact with different types of elements,
JavaScript alerts, frames, and windows in Python. You will learn how to perform actions
such as sending values to elements, performing clicks, and selecting options from
dropdowns. You will also see how to handle frames, different types of JavaScript alerts,
and switch between child browser windows.
Chapter 5, Synchronizing Tests, introduces you to various wait methods provided by
Selenium to synchronize tests for reliable and robust execution. You will learn how to
use the implicit and explicit wait to implement synchronization in Selenium tests. You
will learn various methods to implement explicit wait in our test scripts.
Chapter 6, Cross-browser Testing, dives into using RemoteWebDriver to run crossbrowser tests on remote machines or through the Selenium Grid. You will learn how to
use RemoteWebDriver to run tests on remote machines.
We will also set up a Selenium Grid to run tests on various combinations of browsers and
operating systems. You will also see how to execute tests on headless browsers such as
PhantomJS. At the end of the chapter, we will see how to use cloud testing tools such as
Sauce Labs and BrowserStack to run tests in cloud using RemoteWebDriver.

Chapter 7, Testing on Mobile, shows you how to test applications on mobile devices
using Selenium WebDriver and Appium. We will set up Appium to test our sample
application on iOS and on an Android emulator and device. You will also learn how to
run native mobile applications using Appium.
Chapter 8, Page Objects and Data-driven Testing, introduces you to two important
design patterns to implement a maintainable and efficient testing framework. You will
learn how to use page objects to hide the technical details of locators, and divide
operations on pages into separate classes and create test cases that are more readable
and easy to maintain. You will then learn how to create data-driven tests using the
unittest library.
Chapter 9, Advanced Techniques of Selenium WebDriver, dives into some of the
advanced techniques of using Selenium for automating browsers for testing. You will
learn how to use various action methods for simulating complex mouse and keyboard
operations using Selenium. You will see how to handle session cookies, capture
screenshots during a test run, and create a movie of the entire test run.
Chapter 10, Integration with Other Tools and Frameworks, shows you how to use
Selenium WebDriver with automated acceptance testing frameworks such as Behave and
Continuous Integration tools. You will first learn how to integrate Selenium with Behave
to create automated acceptance tests. We will implement a sample feature and acceptance
tests on UI using the Selenium WebDriver. At end of the chapter, we will set up running
the tests that we created as part of Continuous Integration using Jenkins. We will set up a
schedule to run the tests on a daily frequency.
By the end of this book, you will have learned all the essential features of Selenium
WebDriver to create your own web testing framework in Python.

Getting Started with Selenium

WebDriver and Python
Selenium automates browsers. It automates the interaction we do in a browser
window such as navigating to a website, clicking on links, filling out forms, submitting
forms, navigating through pages, and so on. It works on every major browser available
out there.
In order to use Selenium WebDriver, we need a programing language to write
automation scripts. The language that we select should also have a Selenium client
library available.
In this book, we will use Python along with the Selenium WebDriver client library
to create automated scripts. Python is a widely used general-purpose, high-level
programming language. It's easy and its syntax allows us to express concepts in
fewer lines of code. It emphasizes code readability and provides constructs that
enable us to write programs on both the small and large scale. It also provides a
number of in-built and user-written libraries to achieve complex tasks quite easily.
The Selenium WebDriver client library for Python provides access to all the Selenium
WebDriver features and Selenium standalone server for remote and distributed
testing of browser-based applications. Selenium Python language bindings are
developed and maintained by David Burns, Adam Goucher, Maik Rder, Jason
Huggins, Luke Semerau, Miki Tebeka, and Eric Allenin.
The Selenium WebDriver client library is supported on Python Version 2.6, 2.7, 3.2,
and 3.3.
This chapter will introduce you to the Selenium WebDriver client library for Python
by demonstrating its installation, basic features, and overall structure.

Getting Started with Selenium WebDriver and Python

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

Installing Python and Selenium package

Selecting and setting up a Python editor

Implementing a sample script using the Selenium WebDriver Python

client library

Implementing cross-browser support with Internet Explorer and

Google Chrome

Preparing your machine

As a first step of using Selenium with Python, we'll need to install it on our computer
with the minimum requirements possible. Let's set up the basic environment with
the steps explained in the following sections.

Installing Python
You will find Python installed by default on most Linux distributions, Mac OS X, and
other Unix machines. On Windows, you will need to install it separately. Installers
for different platforms can be found at http://python.org/download/.
All the examples in this book are written and
tested on Python 2.7 and Python 3.0 on Windows 8
operating systems.

Installing the Selenium package

The Selenium WebDriver Python client library is available in the Selenium package.
To install the Selenium package in a simple way, use the pip installer tool available
at https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/.
With pip, you can simply install or upgrade the Selenium package using the
following command:
pip install -U selenium

This is a fairly simple process. This command will set up the Selenium WebDriver
client library on your machine with all modules and classes that we will need to
create automated scripts using Python. The pip tool will download the latest version
of the Selenium package and install it on your machine. The optional U flag will
upgrade the existing version of the installed package to the latest version.
[8]

Chapter 1

You can also download the latest version of the Selenium package source from
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/selenium. Just click on the Download button on
the upper-right-hand side of the page, unarchive the downloaded file, and install it
with following command:
python setup.py install

Browsing the Selenium WebDriver Python

documentation
The Selenium WebDriver Python client library documentation is available at
http://selenium.googlecode.com/git/docs/api/py/api.html as shown
in the following screenshot:

[9]

Getting Started with Selenium WebDriver and Python

It offers detailed information on all core classes and functions of Selenium

WebDriver. Also note the following links for Selenium documentation:

The official documentation at http://docs.seleniumhq.org/docs/

offers documentation for all the Selenium components with examples in
supported languages

Selenium Wiki at https://code.google.com/p/selenium/w/list lists

some useful topics that we will explore later in this book

Selecting an IDE
Now that we have Python and Selenium WebDriver set up, we will need an editor
or an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to write automation scripts.
A good editor or IDE increases the productivity and helps in doing a lot of other
things that make the coding experience simple and easy. While we can write Python
code in simple editors such as Emacs, Vim, or Notepad, using an IDE will make life
a lot easier. There are many IDEs to choose from. Generally, an IDE provides the
following features to accelerate your development and coding time:

A graphical code editor with code completion and IntelliSense

A code explorer for functions and classes

Syntax highlighting

Project management

Code templates

Tools for unit testing and debugging

Source control support

If you're new to Python, or you're a tester working for the first time in Python, your
development team will help you to set up the right IDE.
However, if you're starting with Python for the first time and don't know which IDE
to select, here are a few choices that you might want to consider.

PyCharm
PyCharm is developed by JetBrains, a leading vendor of professional development
tools and IDEs such as IntelliJ IDEA, RubyMine, PhpStorm, and TeamCity.
PyCharm is a polished, powerful, and versatile IDE that works pretty well. It brings
best of the JetBrains experience in building powerful IDEs with lots of other features
for a highly productive experience.
[ 10 ]

Chapter 1

PyCharm is supported on Windows, Linux, and Mac. To know more about PyCharm
and its features visit http://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/.
PyCharm comes in two versionsa community edition and a professional edition.
The community edition is free, whereas you have to pay for the professional edition.
Here is the PyCharm community edition running a sample Selenium script in the
following screenshot:

[ 11 ]

Getting Started with Selenium WebDriver and Python

The community edition is great for building and running Selenium scripts with its
fantastic debugging support. We will use PyCharm in the rest of this book. Later in
this chapter, we will set up PyCharm and create our first Selenium script.
All the examples in this book are built using PyCharm; however,
you can easily use these examples in your choice of editor or IDE.

The PyDev Eclipse plugin

The PyDev Eclipse plugin is another widely used editor among Python developers.
Eclipse is a famous open source IDE primarily built for Java; however, it also offers
support to various other programming languages and tools through its powerful
plugin architecture.
Eclipse is a cross-platform IDE supported on Windows, Linux, and Mac. You can get
the latest edition of Eclipse at http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/.
You need to install the PyDev plugin separately after setting up Eclipse. Use the
tutorial from Lars Vogel to install PyDev at http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/
Python/article.html to install PyDev. Installation instructions are also available
at http://pydev.org/.

[ 12 ]

Chapter 1

Here's the Eclipse PyDev plugin running a sample Selenium script as shown in the
following screenshot:

PyScripter
For the Windows users, PyScripter can also be a great choice. It is open source,
lightweight, and provides all the features that modern IDEs offer such as IntelliSense
and code completion, testing, and debugging support. You can find more about
PyScripter along with its download information at https://code.google.com/p/
pyscripter/.

[ 13 ]

Getting Started with Selenium WebDriver and Python

Here's PyScripter running a sample Selenium script as shown in the following

screenshot:

[ 14 ]

Chapter 1

Setting up PyCharm
Now that we have seen IDE choices, let's set up PyCharm. All examples in this book
are created with PyCharm. However, you can set up any other IDE of your choice
and use examples as they are. We will set up PyCharm with following steps to get
started with Selenium Python:
1. Download and install the PyCharm Community Edition from JetBrains site
http://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/download/index.html.
2. Launch the PyCharm Community Edition. Click on the Create New Project
option on the PyCharm Community Edition dialog box as shown in the
following screenshot:

[ 15 ]

Getting Started with Selenium WebDriver and Python

3. On the Create New Project dialog box, as shown in next screenshot, specify
the name of your project in the Project name field. In this example, setests
is used as the project name. We need to configure the interpreter for the
button to set up the interpreter, as shown in the
first time. Click on the
following screenshot:

4. On the Python Interpreter dialog box, click on the plus icon. PyCharm will
suggest the installed interpreter similar to the following screenshot. Select the
interpreter from Select Interpreter Path.

[ 16 ]

Chapter 1

5. PyCharm will configure the selected interpreter as shown in the following

screenshot. It will show a list of packages that are installed along with
Python. Click on the Apply button and then on the OK button:

6. On the Create New Project dialog box, click on the OK button to create
the project:

[ 17 ]

Getting Started with Selenium WebDriver and Python

Taking your first steps with Selenium and

Python
We are now ready to start with creating and running automated scripts in Python.
Let's begin with Selenium WebDriver and create a Python script that uses Selenium
WebDriver classes and functions to automate browser interaction.
We will use a sample web application for most of the examples in this book. This
sample application is built on a famous e-commerce frameworkMagento. You
can find the application at http://demo.magentocommerce.com/.
Downloading the example code
You can download the example code files from your account at
http://www.packtpub.com for all the Packt Publishing books
you have purchased. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you
can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register
to have the files e-mailed directly to you.
The example code is also hosted at https://github.com/
upgundecha/learnsewithpython.

In this sample script, we will navigate to the demo version of the application, search
for products, and list the names of products from the search result page with the
following steps:
1. Let's use the project that we created earlier while setting up PyCharm. Create
a simple Python script that will use the Selenium WebDriver client library. In
Project Explorer, right-click on setests and navigate to New | Python File
from the pop-up menu:

[ 18 ]

Chapter 1

2. On the New Python file dialog box, enter searchproducts in the Name field
and click on the OK button:

3. PyCharm will add a new tab searchproducts.py in the code editor area.
Copy the following code in the searchproduct.py tab:
from selenium import webdriver
# create a new Firefox session
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.implicitly_wait(30)
driver.maximize_window()
# navigate to the application home page
driver.get("http://demo.magentocommerce.com/")
# get the search textbox
search_field = driver.find_element_by_name("q")
search_field.clear()
# enter search keyword and submit
search_field.send_keys("phones")
search_field.submit()
# get all the anchor elements which have product names displayed
# currently on result page using find_elements_by_xpath method
products = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//h2[@class='productname']/a")
# get the number of anchor elements found
print "Found " + str(len(products)) + " products:"
# iterate through each anchor element and print the text that is
# name of the product
for product in products:
print product.text
# close the browser window
driver.quit()
[ 19 ]

Getting Started with Selenium WebDriver and Python

If you're using any other IDE or editor of your choice, create

a new file, copy the code to the new file, and save the file as
searchproducts.py.

4. To run the script, press the Ctrl + Shift + F10 combination in the PyCharm
code window or select Run 'searchproducts' from the Run menu. This will
start the execution and you will see a new Firefox window navigating to
the demo site and the Selenium commands getting executed in the Firefox
window. If all goes well, at the end, the script will close the Firefox window.
The script will print the list of products in the PyCharm console as shown in
the following screenshot:

[ 20 ]

Chapter 1

We can also run this script through the command line with the
following command. Open the command line, then open the
setests directory, and run following command:
python searchproducts.py

We will use command line as the preferred method in the rest

of the book to execute the tests.

We'll spend some time looking into the script that we created just now. We will go
through each statement and understand Selenium WebDriver in brief. There is a lot
to go through in the rest of the book.
The selenium.webdriver module implements the browser driver classes that are
supported by Selenium, including Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, and
various other browsers, and RemoteWebDriver to test on browsers that are hosted
on remote machines.
We need to import webdriver from the Selenium package to use the Selenium
WebDriver methods:
from selenium import webdriver

Next, we need an instance of a browser that we want to use. This will provide a
programmatic interface to interact with the browser using the Selenium commands.
In this example, we are using Firefox. We can create
an instance of Firefox as shown in following code:
driver = webdriver.Firefox()

During the run, this will launch a new Firefox window. We also set a few options on
the driver:
driver.implicitly_wait(30)
driver.maximize_window()

We configured a timeout for Selenium to execute steps using an implicit wait of 30

seconds for the driver and maximized the Firefox window through the Selenium
API. We will learn more about implicit wait in Chapter 5, Synchronizing Tests.
Next, we will navigate to the demo version of the application using its URL by
calling the driver.get() method. After the get() method is called, WebDriver
waits until the page is fully loaded in the Firefox window and returns the control
to the script.

[ 21 ]

Getting Started with Selenium WebDriver and Python

After loading the page, Selenium will interact with various elements on the page,
like a human user. For example, on the Home page of the application, we need to
enter a search term in a textbox and click on the Search button. These elements are
implemented as HTML input elements and Selenium needs to find these elements to
simulate the user action. Selenium WebDriver provides a number of methods to find
these elements and interact with them to perform operations such as sending values,
clicking buttons, selecting items in dropdowns, and so on. We will see more about
this in Chapter 3, Finding Elements.
In this example, we are finding the Search textbox using the find_element_by_name
method. This will return the first element matching the name attribute specified in
the find method. The HTML elements are defined with tag and attributes. We can
use this information to find an element, by following the given steps:
1. In this example, the Search textbox has the name attribute defined as q and
we can use this attribute as shown in the following code example:
search_field = driver.find_element_by_name("q")

2. Once the Search textbox is found, we will interact with this element by
clearing the previous value (if entered) using the clear() method and
enter the specified new value using the send_keys() method. Next, we
will submit the search request by calling the submit() method:
search_field.clear()
search_field.send_keys("phones")
search_field.submit()

3. After submission of the search request, Firefox will load the result page
returned by the application. The result page has a list of products that
match the search term, which is phones. We can read the list of results and
specifically the names of all the products that are rendered in the anchor
<a> element using the find_elements_by_xpath() method. This will return
more than one matching element as a list:
products =
driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//h2[@class=
'product-name']/a")

4. Next, we will print the number of products (that is the number of anchor <a>
elements) that are found on the page and the names of the products using the
.text property of all the anchor <a> elements:
print "Found " + str(len(products)) + " products:"
for product in products:
print product.text

[ 22 ]

Chapter 1

5. At end of the script, we will close the Firefox browser using the driver.
quit() method:
driver.quit()

This example script gives us a concise example of using Selenium WebDriver and
Python together to create a simple automation script. We are not testing anything in
this script yet. Later in the book, we will extend this simple script into a set of tests
and use various other libraries and features of Python.

Cross-browser support
So far we have built and run our script with Firefox. Selenium has extensive support
for cross-browser testing where you can automate on all the major browsers
including Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, and headless browsers
such as PhantomJS. In this section, we will set up and run the script that we created
in the previous section with Internet Explorer and Google Chrome to see the
cross-browser capabilities of Selenium WebDriver.

Setting up Internet Explorer

There is a little more to run scripts on Internet Explorer. To run tests on Internet
Explorer, we need to download and set up the InternetExplorerDriver server.
The InternetExplorerDriver server is a standalone server executable that
implements WebDriver's wire protocol to work as glue between the test script and
Internet Explorer. It supports major IE versions on Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7,
and Windows 8 operating systems. Let's set up the InternetExplorerDriver server
with the following steps:
1. Download the InternetExplorerDriver server from http://www.
seleniumhq.org/download/. You can download 32- or 64-bit versions
based on the system configuration that you are using.
2. After downloading the InternetExplorerDriver server, unzip and copy
the file to the same directory where scripts are stored.
3. On IE 7 or higher, the Protected Mode settings for each zone must have the
same value. Protected Mode can either be on or off, as long as it is for all the
zones. To set the Protected Mode settings:
1. Choose Internet Options from the Tools menu.
2. On the Internet Options dialog box, click on the Security tab.

[ 23 ]

Getting Started with Selenium WebDriver and Python

3. Select each zone listed in Select a zone to view or change security

settings and make sure Enable Protected Mode (requires restarting
Internet Explorer) is either checked or unchecked for all the
zones. All the zones should have the same settings as shown in
the following screenshot:

While using the InternetExplorerDriver server, it is

also important to keep the browser zoom level set to 100
percent so that the native mouse events can be set to the
correct coordinates.

4. Finally, modify the script to use Internet Explorer. Instead of creating an

instance of the Firefox class, we will use the IE class in the following way:
import os
from selenium import webdriver
[ 24 ]

Chapter 1
# get the path of IEDriverServer
dir = os.path.dirname(__file__)
ie_driver_path = dir + "\IEDriverServer.exe"
# create a new Internet Explorer session
driver = webdriver.Ie(ie_driver_path)
driver.implicitly_wait(30)
driver.maximize_window()
# navigate to the application home page
driver.get("http://demo.magentocommerce.com/")
# get the search textbox
search_field = driver.find_element_by_name("q")
search_field.clear()
# enter search keyword and submit
search_field.send_keys("phones")
search_field.submit()
# get all the anchor elements which have product names displayed
# currently on result page using find_elements_by_xpath method
products = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//h2[@class='productname']/a")
# get the number of anchor elements found
print "Found " + str(len(products)) + " products:"
# iterate through each anchor element and print the text that is
# name of the product
for product in products:
print product.text
# close the browser window
driver.quit()

In this script, we passed the path of the InternetExplorerDriver server

while creating the instance of an IE browser class.
5. Run the script and Selenium will first launch the InternetExplorerDriver
server, which launches the browser, and execute the steps.
The InternetExplorerDriver server acts as an intermediary between the
Selenium script and the browser. Execution of the actual steps is very similar
to what we observed with Firefox.
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Getting Started with Selenium WebDriver and Python

Read more about the important configuration options for

Internet Explorer at https://code.google.com/p/
selenium/wiki/InternetExplorerDriver and the
DesiredCapabilities article at https://code.google.com/p/
selenium/wiki/DesiredCapabilities.

Setting up Google Chrome

Setting up and running Selenium scripts on Google Chrome is similar to
Internet Explorer. We need to download the ChromeDriver server similar to
InternetExplorerDriver. The ChromeDriver server is a standalone server
developed and maintained by the Chromium team. It implements WebDriver's wire
protocol for automating Google Chrome. It is supported on Windows, Linux, and
Mac operating systems. Set up the ChromeDriver server using the following steps:
1. Download the ChromeDriver server from http://chromedriver.storage.
googleapis.com/index.html.
2. After downloading the ChromeDriver server, unzip and copy the file to the
same directory where the scripts are stored.
3. Finally, modify the sample script to use Chrome. Instead of creating an
instance of the Firefox class, we will use the Chrome class in the following way:
import os
from selenium import webdriver
# get the path of chromedriver
dir = os.path.dirname(__file__)
chrome_driver_path = dir + "\chromedriver.exe"
#remove the .exe extension on linux or mac platform
# create a new Chrome session
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_driver_path)
driver.implicitly_wait(30)
driver.maximize_window()
# navigate to the application home page
driver.get("http://demo.magentocommerce.com/")
# get the search textbox
search_field = driver.find_element_by_name("q")
search_field.clear()
# enter search keyword and submit
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Chapter 1
search_field.send_keys("phones")
search_field.submit()
# get all the anchor elements which have product names displayed
# currently on result page using find_elements_by_xpath method
products = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//h2[@class='productname']/a")
# get the number of anchor elements found
print "Found " + str(len(products)) + " products:"
# iterate through each anchor element and print the text that is
# name of the product
for product in products:
print product.text
# close the browser window
driver.quit()

In this script, we passed the path of the ChromeDriver server while creating
an instance of the Chrome browser class.
4. Run the script. Selenium will first launch the Chromedriver server, which
launches the Chrome browser, and execute the steps. Execution of the actual
steps is very similar to what we observed with Firefox.
Read more about ChromeDriver at https://code.
google.com/p/selenium/wiki/ChromeDriver and
https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/
chromedriver/home.

Summary
In this chapter, we introduced you to Selenium and its components. We installed the
selenium package using the pip tool. Then we looked at various Editors and IDEs
to ease our coding experience with Selenium and Python and set up PyCharm. Then
we built a simple script on a sample application covering some of the high-level
concepts of Selenium WebDriver Python client library using Firefox. We ran the script
and analyzed the outcome. Finally, we explored the cross-browser testing support of
Selenium WebDriver by configuring and running the script with Internet Explorer and
Google Chrome.
In next chapter, we will learn how to use the unittest library to create automated
tests using Selenium WebDriver. We will also learn how to create a suite of tests and
run tests in groups.
[ 27 ]

Get more information Learning Selenium Testing Tools with Python

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