Hidden Browser testing in Selenium webdriver using PhantomJS

 

Selenium webdriver helps in automating web applications by loading the application in browsers. But during the execution it's not possible to minimize/hide the browser even if the user intend to. There are tweaks such as setting the window size like driver.manage().window().setPosition(new Point(-2000, 0));. But a question arises, if browser is invoked in minimized mode, whats the need of invoking it. Why don't we run it in background? Such a question arised in mind too. A good answer for this is PhantomJS. PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with a JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG.

Like many other packages, PhantomJS supports Selenium webdriver too. You need to download the executable file from PhantomJS webpage, store the .exe file in class resource path. This can be used to load webdriver.

See below code:

public void navigation() {
DesiredCapabilities caps = new DesiredCapabilities();

String phantompath= loadPhantomJS();

caps.setCapability(PhantomJSDriverService.PHANTOMJS_EXECUTABLE_PATH_PROPERTY, phantompath);

try{

driver = new PhantomJSDriver(caps);

}

catch(IllegalStateException ie){

if(driver!=null){

driver.quit();

}

}

driver.manage().window().setSize(new Dimension(1124,1024));
driver.get(obj.getProperty("url"));

    }

private static String loadPhantomJS() {
        String phantomJs = "phantomjs.exe";
        String dir1 = System.getProperty("user.dir");;
        try {
            InputStream in = Exitfunctions.class.getResourceAsStream("/phantom/" + phantomJs);
            File fileOut = new File(dir1 +"/"+ phantomJs);
            OutputStream out = FileUtils.openOutputStream(fileOut);
            IOUtils.copy(in, out);
            in.close();
            out.close();
            return fileOut.getAbsolutePath();
        } catch (Exception e) {
            return "";
        }
    } 

PhantomJS need to quit once the execution is done or any exception occurs. Unless, PhantomJS service will be running in background which may cause exception while next execution of your program. You may use driver.quit(); itself.

Link to download PhantomJS: http://phantomjs.org/