Selenium is fast becoming one of the most widely used test automation tools for web based applications. While working on selenium projects we faced some common issues that I thought is best addressed through the solutions I am listing below. In case you have tried other solutions and they have worked for you, please feel free to add your inputs in the comments box.

Issue No. 1. Issue in handling popup windows / Frame

Solution: Pop-ups that are very commonly found on the GUI of web apps are many times not recorded by selenium or cause issues while running selenium scripts. The table below gives a snapshot at how these issues can be handled

Popup Type Description Solution

Alert Popup (Message box) Message box popup on application To handle alert popup you can use getAlert functions e.g. selenium.GetAlert();

This will click on Ok button of alert and return alert message.

Confirmation Popup This type of popup has Ok & Cancel buttons You can select the button you want to click, by using below statements before GetConfirmation

For Ok – chooseOkOnNextConfirmation

For Cancel – chooseCancelOnNextConfirmation

And then use GetConfirmation as follows,

selenium.GetConfirmation();

This will click on selected button & return confirmation message.

Popup Window/ Frame In this type of popup, the Frame/window contains data fields where we have to fill values in fields. this can be done using SelectFrame

Following code will illustrate how this can be done.

selenium.Click(btnSubmit)

// This will open a popup window asking user to enter activation code & click on confirm button

selenium.SelectFrame(frmActivationCode); // this will transfer the control to Activation code frame i.e. popup window

//Now you can process objects from popup frame

selenium.Type(txtactivationCode, stractivecode);

selenium.Click(btnConfirm);

// After this you have to get back the control to parent window again using

selenium.SelectWindow(“”);

Issue No.2. Selenium does not trigger event on changing values

Solution: Selenium does not trigger event on changing values so we have to explicitly trigger the event using fireEvent,

selenium.FireEvent(cmbCategory, “onchange”);

Here, cmbCategory is object on which you want to fire event & onchange is the name of event.

Issue No.3. Synchronization issue leading to timeout

Solution:

For this type of scenario I created a function ‘CheckElementPresent’ which will take object locator as parameter & will return true once object is visible.

CheckElementPresent(btnSubmit)

Here, I have used selenium.IsElementPresent(locator) to verify object is present in for loop with Thread.Sleep

Issue No.4. Handling SSL certificates

Solution: Many times we face issue in SSL certificates for selenium tests. We can handle this issue by using –trustAllSSLCertificates & firefox profiles as shown below,

a. For browser other than firefox

Use following command to start selenium server, this will start selenium server which trust all SSL certificates.

C: > java -jar c:\Selenium\selenium-server2.14.0.jar. –trustAllSSLCertificates

b. For Firefox browser

Create a new firefox profile (steps to create profile – http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles)

And accept SSL Certificate using same profile. Now, use the same profile while running selenium server using following command,

C:> java -jar c:\Selenium\selenium-server2.14.0.jar. -firefoxProfileTemplate /C:\Selenium\ Profile

Here were some issues that I faced and the solutions I came up with. Please share any other solutions you know of for the above issues. Also please share other issues that you faced and if possible provide the solutions that you came up with. Happy testing! 

Hemant Jadhav | Senior Consultant | ZenTest Labs