Can I automate Chrome request blocking using Selenium-webdriver for Ruby?

Question

I am a QA automation analyst responsible for testing a multi-platform online banking application. For our automation testing we use RubyMine suite with Gherkin/Cucumber, Ruby-scripted steps and Selenium-webdriver, Watir and page-object gems/libraries.

I have a number of scripts that I cannot automate completely without manual intervention, and these include blocking certain network calls through Telerik Fiddler to produce warning pages or error messages, etc. The future of our automation would be to do this through RubyMine instead of Fiddler for network blocking. I know there is a way to do this in Chrome using Inspect Element and the Network menu using enable request blocking. However, I cannot figure out a way to force Chrome through Ruby/Selenium to block a given request. The only way is do manually do it myself, and therefore I can't actually automate these as wanted.

So, my question -- is this a possibility to automate request-blocking with Selenium-webdriver? And, if so, where should I begin to look for help with this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

To block URLs from loading with Selenium with the DevTool API:

def send_cmd(driver, cmd, params={})
  bridge = driver.send(:bridge)
  resource = "session/#{bridge.session_id}/chromium/send_command_and_get_result"
  response = bridge.http.call(:post, resource, {'cmd':cmd, 'params': params})
  raise response[:value] if response[:status]
  return response[:value]
end

send_cmd(driver, "Network.setBlockedURLs", {'urls': ["*"]})
send_cmd(driver, "Network.enable")

Answer 2

It's not very well documented, but you can also implement request blocking by passing the host-resolver-rules option to chrome and mapping the domain to localhost or an invalid IP. Something like this should work for you:

options = Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Options.new
options.add_argument('--host-resolver-rules=MAP www.google-analytics.com 127.0.0.1')
driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :chrome, options: options