Webdriver showModalDialog

Question

We are using webdriver for our functional tests. But our application uses the showModalDialog JS function a lot to open a popup. When we try to test this functionality with webdriver it hangs from the moment the popup is opened.

We tried several things to test this:

• Using the workaround explained here. But this seems to be a fix for selenium and not for webdriver. We tried it but it didn't work.
• Searching for a good alternative, HtmlUnit opened the modal dialog and could interact with it, but it has it's drawbacks like no visual help to fix certain tests and it stopped execution when it detected a JS error in a JS library we have to use but have no control over.

How can we test this or work around this problem?

Answer 1

From my experiences with various automation tools interaction with "webpage dialog" windows opened from IE using window.showModalDialog() or window.showModelessDialog() is not available.

Since the window is not a "true" window (look at the taskbar, it doesn't even show up) most tools can't "inspect" it and/or interact with it.

However if you do find a tool that will, please advise - there are many people looking for such a beast.

That all said, if you can possibly avoid using either of these 2 proprietary methods you'll have much more luck.

(and yes, for the picky ones, Firefox and Chrome have adopted these kind of dialogs but they don't work quite the same)

Answer 2

None of the answers answer the question. If the driver hangs, then you can't call any methods on it. The question is NOT about finding the pop up, it is about how to stop the driver hanging. The only way I have found is to not use showModalDialog. This can be done by adding the folowing to your test code :

((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript("window.showModalDialog = window.open;");

which calls window.open each time your JavaScript calls window.showModalDialog.