Selenium 2 makes automation debugging easier

March 28 08:00 2011 by Nataliia Vasylyna Print This Article

One of the parts of Selenium 1.0 that I never enjoyed was debugging automation that didn’t work. I had to faff about creating custom Firefox profiles with Firebug installed and set to go through a proxy.

Selenium 2 makes all of that so much easier. With the code below, my test runs through a proxy server on port 8081 and has Firebug installed so that I can breakpoint my test and then go debugging around in the browser DOM, debug the JavaScript to make sure events get fired, etc. etc.

I found most of the information to do this on the Selenium Forums.

The code should be easy enough to follow if you are already using Selenium 2

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.openqa.selenium.Proxy;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxProfile;

@Test
public void FirefoxUseExtensions() throws IOException{

  // setup the firefox proxy to point to Burpsuite
  // on port 8081

  Proxy localhostProxy = new Proxy();
  localhostProxy.setProxyType(Proxy.ProxyType.MANUAL);
  localhostProxy.setHttpProxy("localhost:8081");

  // Prior to running the test
  // Download the firebug extension file
  // to a local folder

  String extensionPath = System.getProperty("user.dir")
      + "/"
      + "firefoxExtensions/firebug-1.6.2.xpi";

  // create a custom profile

  FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();

  // set the profile to use the proxy settings

  profile.setProxyPreferences(localhostProxy);

  // stop firebug showing the first run
  // screen by setting the 'last version'
  // to the current one downloaded
  // try without this and see what happens!

  profile.setPreference("extensions.firebug.currentVersion", "1.6.2");

  // add the extension to firefox

  profile.addExtension(new File(extensionPath));

  // start firefox with the custom profile

  WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

  // go to your favourite testing web site

  driver.get("http://www.eviltester.com");

}

Source: http://www.eviltester.com/index.php/2011/03/23/selenium-2-makes-automation-debugging-easier/

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