Develop Selenium webdriver scripts using javascript

Question

Can we develop selenium webdriver scripts using javascript only. If yes what are the advantages of using javascript instead of using java or C# or any language.? In what scenario we should consider Javascript over other languages?

Thank you.

Answer 1

There are numerous Javascript frameworks written on top of the JS selenium bindings (webdriver.io, nightwatch, protractor).

Benefits of JS over C# or Java

• Less boilerplate
• Grunt or gulp for build automaton> maven, msbuild or even gradle
• Better integration with front-end frameworks (protractor)
• JS is generally used in all web projects so it works as a universal language that all devs can understand.
• NPM for dependency management and the massive number of libraries in it that may drastically reduce your workload.

Drawbacks

• The Java bindings have more documentation / resources available to debug issues.
• Speed (I find using the AjaxPageFactory in Java to be a lot faster than protractor and I have not found an equivalent in Javascript)
• Promises can be complicated coming from Java or C#.
• No support for Microsoft Edge currently.

As far as specific use cases if you use Angular heavily on the front-end Protractor is a tool designed specifically for functional testing of angular and should be used over C# or Java. Protractor can be used with frameworks such as React.js but it wasn't designed for it and you may need to include a lot of waitForElement type code.

A few things I have found really nice about protractor specifically is the configuration for more comprehensive multi-browser testing. To set this up in Java or C# involves a lot of configuration and in Protractor it could be as simple as make two changes to your conf.js file. I also find myself using a lot of grunt plugins to set up and tear down my tests which are very simple to configure.

I would recommend using Babel.js so you can utilize the es2015 JS syntax which makes the transition from Java or C# simpler due to the inclusion of classes and I personally find it much more cleaner for writing page objects.

One thing to be aware of is a lot of simple actions in Selenium for Java and C# are more complicated in Javascript because most actions return promises.

Java Version

int previousNumberOfItems = driver.findElements(By.className(".item")).size();
driver.findElements(By.cssSelector(".addItemButton")).click();
int currentNumberOfItems = driver.findElements(By.className(".item")).size();
assert.AssertTrue(currentNumberOfItems .contentEquals(previousNumberOfItems +1));

Protractor (JS) Version

element.all(by.className(".item")).count().then(function(number){
 element(by.css(".addItemButton")).click();
 expect(element.all(by.className(".item")).count()).toBe(number+1);
});

I can't really speak for nightwatch or webdriver.io they may be much better for testing non-angular apps using Javascript.

• Tanmay: I'm new JS but earlier worked on selenium with Java. Can you please let me know the scope of JS i should be familiar with for selenium and which editor to be used for automation.
• sonhu: A basic javascript tutorial should get you up to speed fast especially if you already know Java and Selenium. There are a lot of ways to structure your protractor page objects but I think the constructor pattern is the easiest. samselikoff.com/blog/some-Javascript-constructor-patterns . Then it helps to learn a little about modules and promises but only the bare minimum is necessary for protractor. Last familiarizing yourself with NPM and Grunt / or Gulp would be really helpful.
• Tanmay: thank you for info. Does Selenium webdriver and webdriverJS have same APIs? I'm using net-beans now but it does not give any intelligence as Eclipse would give for webdriver APIs.
• sonhu: I don't use IDE's when writing Javascript so I am not the best person to ask. Sounds like a reasonable new question to submit. But if you look at the protractor documentation a lot of the webdriverJS api is there and it re-directs you to that documentation for parts of the code not specific to protractor. I do not think that alone would help the intellisense (intelligence) in netbeans. angular.github.io/protractor/#/api?view=webdriver.By.className
• sonhu: I think I may have misread your question. Javascript is a dynamic language so auto-completion will not work as well as Java or C#. I think Webstorm is the only IDE that will have decent auto-completion. Typescript would definitely be able to do that but I wouldn't recommend learning it until you can write selenium in javascript pretty well because the documentation is not great and there isn't a lot of stackoverflow answers.

Answer 2

Yes you can use Nodejs protractor Jasime framework with WebDriver.

Here is some link:

Webdriver java script binding

Angularjs Jasmine