Web Driver Methods in Selenium Python

Selenium’s Python Module is built to perform automated testing with Python. Selenium Python bindings provides a simple API to write functional/acceptance tests using Selenium WebDriver. To open a webpage using Selenium Python, checkout – Navigating links using get method – Selenium Python. Just being able to go to places isn’t terribly useful. What we’d really like to do is to interact with the pages, or, more specifically, the HTML elements within a page. There are multiple strategies to find an element using Selenium, checkout – Locating Strategies. Selenium WebDriver offers various useful methods to control the session, or in other words, browser. For example, adding a cookie, pressing back button, navigating among tabs, etc.

This article revolves around Various WebDriver Methods and functions one can use to manipulate DOM and various other actions one can do with Selenium WebDriver in Python.

How to create an WebDriver Object ?

To create object of WebDriver, import WebDriver class from docs and create a object based on different Web Browser and Capabilities. After this one can use this object to perform all the operations of Webdriver. For example, to create object of Firefox, one can use –

# import webdriver
from selenium import webdriver

# create webdriver object
driver = webdriver.Firefox()

Arguments –
Webdriver accepts various arguments to manipulate various features –

• desired_capabilities – A dictionary of capabilities to request when
  starting the browser session. Required parameter.
• browser_profile – A selenium.webdriver.firefox.firefox_profile.FirefoxProfile object.
  Only used if Firefox is requested. Optional.
• proxy – A selenium.webdriver.common.proxy.Proxy object. The browser session will
  be started with given proxy settings, if possible. Optional.
• keep_alive – Whether to configure remote_connection.RemoteConnection to use
  HTTP keep-alive. Defaults to False.
• file_detector – Pass custom file detector object during instantiation. If None,
  then default LocalFileDetector() will be used.
• options – instance of a driver options.Options class

How to use Webdriver in Selenium ?

After one has created an object of Webdriver, open a webpage, and perform various other methods using below syntax and examples. one can perform various actions such as opening a new tab closing a tab, closing a window, adding a cookie, executing javascript, etc.

Project Example –

Let’s try to implement WebDriver methods using https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ and play around with using javascript through selenium python.
Program –

# import webdriver
from selenium import webdriver

# create webdriver object
driver = webdriver.Firefox()

# get geeksforgeeks.org
driver.get("https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/")

# write script
script = "alert('Alert via selenium')"

# generate a alert via javascript
driver.execute_async_script(script)

Output –
Browser generates alert as verified below –

WebDriver Methods in Selenium Python

One can perform a huge number of operations using Webdriver methods such as getting cookie, taking screenshot, etc. Here is a list of important methods used in webdriver.

Method	Description
add_cookie	Adds a cookie to your current session.
back	Goes one step backward in the browser history.
close	Closes the current window.
create_web_element	Creates a web element with the specified element_id.
delete_all_cookies	Delete all cookies in the scope of the session.
delete_cookie	Deletes a single cookie with the given name.
execute_async_script	Asynchronously Executes JavaScript in the current window/frame.
execute_script	Synchronously Executes JavaScript in the current window/frame.
forward	Goes one step forward in the browser history.
fullscreen_window	Invokes the window manager-specific ‘full screen’ operation
get_cookie	Get a single cookie by name. Returns the cookie if found, None if not.
get_cookies	Returns a set of dictionaries, corresponding to cookies visible in the current session.
get_log	Gets the log for a given log type
get_screenshot_as_base64	Gets the screenshot of the current window as a base64 encoded string which is useful in embedded images in HTML.
get_screenshot_as_file	Saves a screenshot of the current window to a PNG image file.
get_screenshot_as_png	Gets the screenshot of the current window as a binary data.
get_window_position	Gets the x, y position of the current window.
get_window_rect	Gets the x, y coordinates of the window as well as height and width of the current window.
get_window_size	Gets the width and height of the current window.
implicitly_wait	Sets a sticky timeout to implicitly wait for an element to be found,
maximize_window	Maximizes the current window that webdriver is using
minimize_window	Invokes the window manager-specific ‘minimize’ operation
quit	Quits the driver and closes every associated window.
refresh	Refreshes the current page.
set_page_load_timeout	Set the amount of time to wait for a page load to complete before throwing an error.
set_script_timeout	Set the amount of time that the script should wait during an execute_async_script call before throwing an error.
set_window_position	Sets the x, y position of the current window. (window.moveTo)
set_window_rect	Sets the x, y coordinates of the window as well as height and width of the current window.
current_url	Gets the URL of the current page.
current_window_handle	Returns the handle of the current window.
page_source	Gets the source of the current page.
title	Returns the title of the current page.