Firefox Webdriver Profile & Desired Capabilities Setting

What is Desired Capabilities ?

Basically, DesiredCapabilities help to set properties for the WebDriver. A typical usecase would be to set the path for the FirefoxDriver if your local installation doesn't correspond to the default settings. capabilities describes a series of key/value pairs that encapsulate aspects of a browser.

FireFox WebDriver and Desired capabilities

Usually we use below code to initiate FireFox driver

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;

Webdriver driver =  new FirefoxDriver();

Now, we need to learn about how to setup custom profile or capabilities of Firefox. So that we can have desired preference for browser. Someone may want to have Firefox accept site certificates and may want to file download to specific location without and popup for save etc..Selenium webdriver helps in setting desired capabilities for FireFox browser.

For setting desired capabilities we need to use below code.

import org.openqa.selenium.remote.DesiredCapabilities; 

DesiredCapabilities dc=DesiredCapabilities.firefox();
Webdriver driver =  new FirefoxDriver(dc);



FireFox Profile 

We can create custom FireFox profile and use it with desired capabilities for example :

import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxProfile;

FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();

Example to use Firefox profile with desired capabilities

DesiredCapabilities dc=DesiredCapabilities.firefox();
FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();
dc.setCapability(FirefoxDriver.PROFILE, profile);
Webdriver driver =  new FirefoxDriver(dc);

Thus the webdriver will get initilized with desired capabilities & profile set.

What preferences to use in firefox profile?

Here is the interesting question, now we know that how to set Firefox profile? What is the use of it? or which preferences can be used with it?  The answer is simple but we need to understand what does the preferences mean here and how we can get to know them.

Preferences can be some setting of Firefox browser specific to the download or any other type of preffred settings. To get the preferences you can open Firefox browser and type "about:config" in url and hit enter. you will get the list of all the Firefox prerences list and Settings.

Now we need to use them in our code for setting Firefox profile for example :

FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();
profile.setAcceptUntrustedCertificates(false);
profile.setAssumeUntrustedCertificateIssuer(true);
profile.setPreference("browser.download.folderList", 2);
profile.setPreference("browser.helperApps.alwaysAsk.force", false); 


Finally you can combile all the things above and initiate FireFox driver as shown in below example:


FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();
DesiredCapabilities dc=DesiredCapabilities.firefox();
profile.setAcceptUntrustedCertificates(false);
profile.setAssumeUntrustedCertificateIssuer(true);
profile.setPreference("browser.download.folderList", 2);
profile.setPreference("browser.helperApps.alwaysAsk.force", false);
profile.setPreference("browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting",false); profile.setPreference("browser.download.dir", "C:\Downloads"); profile.setPreference("browser.download.downloadDir","C:\Downloads"); profile.setPreference("browser.download.defaultFolder","C:\Downloads"); profile.setPreference("browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk","text/anytext ,text/plain,text/html,application/plain" );
dc = DesiredCapabilities.firefox();
dc.setCapability(FirefoxDriver.PROFILE, profile);
Webdriver driver =  new FirefoxDriver(dc);


Above code will initilise firefox driver which will never ask for file download for file MIME type mentioned. We can add more file MIME types in above code as per requirenment. File MIME type can be found here.

For more information on desired capabilities please refere this link.

Selenium WebDriver 2.0

What is selenium ?

Selenium is a set of different software tools each with a different approach to supporting test automation.The entire suite of tools results in a rich set of testing functions specifically geared to the needs of testing of web applications of all types. These operations are highly flexible, allowing many options for locating UI elements and comparing expected test results against actual application behavior. One of Selenium’s key features is the support for executing one’s tests on multiple browser platforms.

History:

Selenium first came to life in 2004 when Jason Huggins was testing an internal application at ThoughtWorks. Being a smart guy, he realized there were better uses of his time than manually stepping through the same tests with every change he made. He developed a Javascript library that could drive interactions with the page, allowing him to automatically rerun tests against multiple browsers. That library eventually became Selenium Core, which underlies all the functionality of Selenium Remote Control (RC) and Selenium IDE. Selenium RC was ground-breaking because no other product allowed you to control a browser from a language of your choice.

Webdriver 2.0 :

WebDriver is a tool for automating testing web applications, and in particular to verify that they work as expected. It aims to provide a friendly API that's easy to explore and understand, which will help make your tests easier to read and maintain.Selenium-WebDriver makes direct calls to the browser using each browser’s native support for automation.

Selenium webdriver can be used with diffrent browser and how it drives the browser means make native call to browser is entirely depends on the browser in use. Webdriver provides very easy to use APIs and can be configured with variety of programming language to write test cases. 

Webdriver can supports the following web browsers:
Internet Explorer,Firefox,chrome,safari, opera.

Languages you can use with webdriver are:
.Net,Java,Perl,PHP,Python,Ruby.

References:  Selenium