Selenium 2: Open link in new tab and close tabs

Question

I want to be able to open a link in a new tab in Selenium 2. Also i want to close the tab when i am finished interacting with the page. How is this possible if I have a WebElement of an <a> tag?

I am using the Java API of Selenium 2 with the Firefox Driver, running on Firefox 4.

Answer 1

The way I figure out for selenium 2, work fine for Chrome and firefox, IE has security check issue:

Set<String> winSet = webDriver.getWindowHandles();
List<String> winList = new ArrayList<String>(winSet);
String newTab = winList.get(winList.size() - 1);
webDriver.close(); // close the original tab
webDriver.switchTo().window(newTab); // switch to new tab

Answer 2

At the moment, the Selenium WebDriver API doesn't have any way of handling tabs. The project would really need a consistent, cross-browser set of methods for managing tabs before I would expect to see an implementation in one of the language bindings like Java. Until then, your JavaScript solution may be the only way, and remember that your code would then be responsible for managing the lifetime of that tab.