How to simulate HTML5 Drag and Drop in Selenium Webdriver?

Question

I am using Python 2.7 and Selenium 2.44.

I want to automate drag and drop action in Selenium WD but according to other related posts Actions in HTML5 are not supported by Selenium yet. Is there any way to simulate drag and drop in Python?

Here is the code I tried:

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://html5demos.com/drag")
target = driver.find_element_by_id("one")
source = driver.find_element_by_id("bin")
actionChains = ActionChains(driver)
actionChains.drag_and_drop(target, source).perform()

and it did not work.

Answer 1

Yes, HTML5 "drag&drop" is not currently supported by Selenium:

• Issue 3604: HTML5 Drag and Drop with Selenium Webdriver

One of the suggested workarounds is to simulate HTML5 drag and drop via JavaScript:

• download drag_and_drop_helper.js
• execute the script via execute_script() calling simulateDragDrop() function on a source element passing the target element as a dropTarget

Sample code:

with open("drag_and_drop_helper.js") as f:
    js = f.read()

driver.execute_script(js + "$('#one').simulateDragDrop({ dropTarget: '#bin'});")

The problem is that it won't work in your case "as is" since it requires jQuery.

---

Now we need to figure out how to dynamically load jQuery. Thankfully, there is a solution.

Complete working example in Python:

from selenium import webdriver

jquery_url = "http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.2.min.js"

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://html5demos.com/drag")
driver.set_script_timeout(30)

# load jQuery helper
with open("jquery_load_helper.js") as f:
    load_jquery_js = f.read()

# load drag and drop helper
with open("drag_and_drop_helper.js") as f:
    drag_and_drop_js = f.read()

# load jQuery
driver.execute_async_script(load_jquery_js, jquery_url)

# perform drag&drop
driver.execute_script(drag_and_drop_js + "$('#one').simulateDragDrop({ dropTarget: '#bin'});")

where jquery_load_helper.js contains:

/** dynamically load jQuery */
(function(jqueryUrl, callback) {
    if (typeof jqueryUrl != 'string') {
        jqueryUrl = 'https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js';
    }
    if (typeof jQuery == 'undefined') {
        var script = document.createElement('script');
        var head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
        var done = false;
        script.onload = script.onreadystatechange = (function() {
            if (!done && (!this.readyState || this.readyState == 'loaded'
                    || this.readyState == 'complete')) {
                done = true;
                script.onload = script.onreadystatechange = null;
                head.removeChild(script);
                callback();
            }
        });
        script.src = jqueryUrl;
        head.appendChild(script);
    }
    else {
        callback();
    }
})(arguments[0], arguments[arguments.length - 1]);

Before/after result: