How to connect to an already open browser?

Question

I would really appreciate a guide on how to connect to an already open browser using Selenium Webdriver via C#.

This issue eats around 30% of my script development time!

Answer 1

Refer to Selenium Issue 18. This is a very popular feature request, which has unfortunately not been implemented. The comments suggest a few workarounds for now, I haven't tried them but you might find something useful.

Answer 2

You can specify starting and closing browser in [TestFixtureSetUp] and [TestFixtureTearDown] and remove it from [SetUp] and [TearDown]. All the tests in [TestFixture] will be run in the same browser. So if you have for example 10 classes and each of them contains 5 tests, instead of 50 browser's openings and closings there will be only 10.

    public IWebDriver driver { get; private set; };

    [TestFixtureSetUp]
    public void TestFixtureSetup()
    {
        driver = new FirefoxDriver();
        driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://www.google.com/");
    }

    [TestFixtureTearDown]
    public void TestFixtureTearDown()
    {
         driver.Quit();
    }

If you want to open and close your browser once, you can inherit [TestFixtureSetUp] and [TestFixtureTearDown] methods from base class and if you have one test class that is executed before others (A_test) and one that is executed last (Z_test) you can set and unset some flags that will tell if we should start browser or not:

namespace Tests
{
[TestFixture]
public abstract class Test
{
    private static bool _flagSetUp;
    private static bool _flagTearDown;
    public IWebDriver driver { get; private set; };

    protected Test()
    {
    }

    public static void SetFlag(bool flagSetUp, bool flagTearDown)
    {
        _flagSetUp = flagSetUp;
        _flagTearDown = flagTearDown;
    }

    [TestFixtureSetUp]
    public void TestFixtureSetup()
    {
        if(_flagSetUp)
        {
            driver = new FirefoxDriver();
            driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://www.google.com/");
            _flagSetUp = false;
        }
    }

    [TestFixtureTearDown]
    public void TestFixtureTearDown()
    {
        if(_flagTearDown)
        {
            driver.Quit();
        }
    }
}

namespace Tests
{
[TestFixture(new object[] { true, false })]
public class A_Test : Test
{
    public A_Test(bool flagSetUp, bool flagTearDown)
    {
        SetFlag(flagSetUp, flagTearDown);
    }

    [Test]
    public void Test1()
    {
       ...
    }
}

namespace Tests
{
[TestFixture(new object[] { false, true })]
public class Z_Test : Test
{
    public A_Test(bool flagSetUp, bool flagTearDown)
    {
        SetFlag(flagSetUp, flagTearDown);
    }

    [Test]
    public void Test2()
    {
       ...
    }
}

The last workaround looks like not good solution. Althouth first workaround also doesn't guarantee 100% tests isolation (btw don't forget to write driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://www.google.com/"); as first step for each test). So probably the best solution will be parallel execution and Setup, Teardown methods for each test.