Selenium 2 chrome driver preferences java equivalent to RubyBindings

6
votes

I've been looking for a way to set the driver preferences for chrome driver using java for the past two days with no luck.

I have however found a solution in ruby VIA RubyBindings and would like to know if there is a java equivalent line I can use for this.

The ruby code is the following:

profile = Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Profile.new
profile['download.prompt_for_download'] = false
profile['download.default_directory'] = "/path/to/dir"

driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :chrome, :profile => profile

While searching I found that chrome does not have a profiler I could use like the FirefoxProfile class, so I started using the DesireCapabilities class instead. After further investigation into this problem I found that I could set the "switches" and "prefs" VIA capabilities.setCapabilitiy and ended up with the following:

Map<String, String> prefs = new Hashtable<String, String>();
prefs.put("download.prompt_for_download", "false");
prefs.put("download.default_directory", "/path/to/dir");
prefs.put("download.extensions_to_open", "pdf");

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.chrome();
capabilities.setCapability("chrome.prefs", prefs);
dr = new ChromeDriver(capabilities);

However I was not able to get this working, the default download directory was never changed to the specified directory once started. I am unsure if there is a problem with how I am trying to set this capability or if the problem lies elsewhere.

In the end I eventually used the solution proposed here:
http://dkage.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/mid-air-trick-make-selenium-download-files/

but I would like to know if it is possible to do this more cleanly but just setting the preferences directly instead of using the UI

Any help is appreciated, Thanks!

Update:
Surprisingly after updating Selenium 2 to version 2.24.1 (and to windows chrome 22), the code above with the Maps work as expected, the only problem now is that they deprecated the the use of the constructor ChromeDriver(DesiredCapabilities capabilities), and instead recommend I use the ChromeOptions class, which I cannot get working for the above scenario.

Below is the wiki page explaining the use of both ChromeOptions and DesiredCapabilities: http://code.google.com/p/chromedriver/wiki/CapabilitiesAndSwitches

3
javagoogle-chromewebdriverselenium-webdriver

3 Answers

2
votes

The Ruby bindings actually expands that to:

{
   "download": {
      "prompt_for_download": false,
      "default_directory": "/path/to/dir"
    }
}

Try building your Java prefs object like that and see if it works. The string vs boolean false could also be an issue.

0
votes

Try this (Forgive my java which is quite rusty, but hopefully you get the idea)

Dictionary download = new Dictionary();
download["default_directory"] = "/path/to/dir";
Dictionary prefs = new Dictionary();
prefs["browser"] = download;

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.chrome();
capabilities.setCapability("chrome.prefs", prefs);
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(capabilities);

Update: I just browsed the code and it seems that what I suggested above probably won't work. The ruby chrome profile class creates zip file with chrome profile file structure in it to support chrome preference. I couldn't find such facility code in java. There is a Firefox profile in java that does the simliar thing for firefox, but obviously that won't work for chrome. So in short, this feature is not supported yet in java.

0
votes

Newer versions (I tested Chrome 44.0.2403.125, Selenium 2.47.1, and ChromeDriver 2.17.340128) work with the following:

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
Map<String, Object> prefs = new HashMap<String, Object>();
prefs.put("download.default_directory", "/path/to/directory");
options.setExperimentalOption("prefs", prefs);
ChromeDriver chromeDriver = new ChromeDriver(options);