Good evening!

Today is December 3rd, you are reading the Selenide Advent calendar, and in today’s post I will answer one simple question.

Which one should I choose, setWebDriver() or WebDriverProvider?

As you know, Selenide opens a browser automatically and closes it at the right moment. You don’t need to care about the browser.

But sometimes you want to open a “custom” browser with some specific settings. Selenide has 2 methods for this. It happened so that I never wrote anywhere how to choose one of them.

So,

Option 1:

  Configuration.browser = MyWebdriverProvider.class.getName();

This option is preferred in most cases. It’s good because class MyWebdriverProvider is only responsible for HOW to open a browser (which options to pass, where to find binaries etc). But is not responsible for WHEN to open and close the browser. Selenide takes care of it.

Option 2:

@Before
public void setUp() {
  var yandexBrowser = new YandexDriver(...);
  WebDriverRunner.setWebDriver(yandexBrowser);
}

This option is worse because you are responsible not only for opening, but also for close the browser. This often causes misunderstanding. Selenide cannot close the browser because you might use it somewhere else. You open it - you close it.

This begs the question:

Why it’s needed at all?

Initially method setWebDriver() was created to enable easy adoption of Selenide in existing projects (without re-writing the existing codebase).

Imagine that company X already has a lot of automated tests on Selenium (or HtmlElements, Thucydides, Serenity or anything else). They want to write new tests on Selenide, but leave existing tests untouched.

Apparently they already have a code snippet in their codebase which opens and closes the browser. They want to say Selenide to use the same browser. That’s when method setWebDriver() is useful. It allows you to run the old and the new code all together, so that it works in the same browser.

As you see, the use of method setWebDriver() is rather narrow. I’m not sure at all if it was ever used in that vein. :)

What’s now?

If you are writing a new project, use WebDriverProvider. SRP.

UPD

Later in Selenide 5.16.1 we added one more option DriverFactory. Now it’s the recommended way to create a customized webdriver.

The idea is very similar to WebDriverProvider, but gives you more control over webdriver options. You need to

1. either implement interface DriverFactory,
2. or create a subclass of ChromeDriverFactory, FirefoxDriverFactory or similar class (which exist in Selenide and implement interface DriverFactory) and override only needed methods. All methods in these classes are made small and declared protected.

You can find examples in Selenide own tests.

See also blog post from Boris Bay.

Andrei Solntsev

selenide.org

03.12.19