Upgrading to version 2 (using webdriver)

Starting with version 2, gocept.selenium uses Selenium’s webdriver API, the plan being to keep our own API as backwards-compatible as possible during the 2.x release series and switching to the webdriver API only with version 3.

This means that we’ve set out to implement the Selenese API on top of webdriver and while this has proven to be possible to a large extent, some details of the Selenese API don’t make any sense or are too different to be worth implementing in a webdriver environment.

Here’s a list of backwards-incompatibilities between gocept.selenium version 1.x and 2.x:

• getEval behaves differently.
  • getEval adds a return statement in front of the code, i.e. to run Javascript code which is not an expression, use runScript
  • getEval has access to different globals now: browserbot is no longer defined, while window and document refer directly to the window under test.
  • getEval returns the dictionary representation of objects instead of the rather uninformative [object Object].
• The browser name syntax has changed: specify Firefox as “firefox”, not “firefox*” (concerns the environment variable GOCEPT_SELENIUM_BROWSER). See the WebDriver wiki for possible browser names.

• With Selenium Remote-Control one had to change the base Firefox profile to be used on the server side (by passing -firefoxProfileTemplate to selenium-server.jar). With WebDriver this has moved to the client side, so you can select a profile by setting the path to an existing Firefox profile as the environment variable GOCEPT_SELENIUM_FF_PROFILE.
• Selenese methods that don’t work yet:
  • highlight
  • getSpeed
  • setSpeed
  • getAllWindowNames
  • getAllWindowTitles
  • selectPopUp
  • deselectPopUp
• Selenese methods with changed behaviour:
  • open: dropped the ignoreResponseCode parameter
  • assertOrdered only works with relative xpath locators, not with any element locators anymore.
• Selenese methods that have been removed and are not coming back:
  • addCustomRequestHeader
  • addLocationStrategy
  • addScript
  • allowNativeXpath
  • answerOnNextPrompt
  • assignId
  • captureNetworkTraffic
  • chooseCancelOnNextConfirmation
  • chooseOKOnNextConfirmation
  • fireEvent
  • focus
  • getMouseSpeed
  • getTable
  • ignoreAttributesWithoutValue
  • removeScript
  • retrieveLastRemoteControlLogs
  • setBrowserLogLevel
  • setContext
  • setCursorPosition
  • setMouseSpeed
  • useXpathLibrary
  • waitForFrameToLoad
• Locator patterns that can no longer be used:
  • element: dom, document
  • option: id
  • frame: relative, dom