RSelenium - Introduction

Selenium is actually composed of a number of projects (http://docs.seleniumhq.org/projects/).

• Selenium IDE
• Selenium Remote Control
• Selenium WebDriver
• Selenium Grid

Selenium WebDriver and Selenium Grid compose Selenium 2.0.

RSelenium interacts with the WebDriver
The WebDriver "drives" the browsers.
The browsers have various bindings
Each browser may have bespoke methods

• Firefox - The driver comes in the form of an xpi (firefox extension)
• Chrome - executable downloaded from the Chromium project
  which acts as a bridge between "chrome" and the "driver".
• IE - similar to chrome
• The SafariDriver is implemented as a Safari browser extension.

• Implements the JsonWireProtocol http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/JsonWireProtocol
  
• Project page: https://github.com/johndharrison/RSelenium
• Issues: https://github.com/johndharrison/RSelenium/issues?state=open
• CRAN: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RSelenium/index.html

• Browser initiation
• Navigation
• DOM interaction
• Frames and Windows

# RSelenium::startServer()
library(RSelenium)
remDr <- remoteDriver(browserName = "someBrowser", remoteServerAddr = ip, port = port)
remDr$open(silent = TRUE)
remDr$navigate("http://somecoolsite")

remDr$Navigate("http://somewhere.com")
remDr$goBack()
remDr$goForward()
remDr$refresh()
remDr$getTitle()
remDr$getCurrentUrl()
remDr$getStatus()
remDr$getAllCookies()
remDr$deleteCookieNamed("PREF")

RSelenium has a number of methods of finding elements in the document object model with two methods to search anchor elements (An anchor is a piece of text which marks the beginning and/or the end of a hypertext link.)

• By id
• By class
• By css selector
• By name
• By tag name
• By link text (anchor elements)
• By partial link text (anchor elements)

remDr$switchToFrame("string|number|null|WebElement")
remDr$getWindowHandles()
remDr$getCurrentWindowHandle()
remDr$switchToWindow("windowId")

• Javascript
• Interacting with shiny apps
• Remote driving
• External providers

• d3Network Example https://github.com/christophergandrud/d3ShinyExample . Neat package for creating interactive network graphs from R. All the power of d3.js without the pain.

• Dialect Map http://spark.rstudio.com/jkatz/SurveyMaps/ If I remember rightly this one went viral was viewed 7 million times and crashed rstudios server.

• RSelenium test app Viewable at http://spark.rstudio.com/johnharrison/shinytestapp/ or can be ran from the Rselenium package locally.

(http://johndharrison.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/rstudioshiny-server-on-digital-ocean.html)

remDr <- remoteDriver(remoteServerAddr = "128.199.255.233", browserName = 'phantomjs')
remDr$open()
remDr$navigate("http://whatismyipaddress.com/")
remDr$screenshot(display = TRUE)
remDr$close(); remDr$closeServer()

• Sauce Labs - http://saucelabs.com/

  user <- "rselenium0"
  pass <- "*******************************"
  port <- 80
  ip <- paste0(user, ':', pass, "@ondemand.saucelabs.com")
  browser <- "firefox"
  version <- "25"
  platform <- "OS X 10.9"
  extraCapabilities <- list(name = "Test RSelenium", username = user, accessKey = pass)
  
  remDr <- remoteDriver$new(remoteServerAddr = ip, port = port, browserName = browser
                        , version = version, platform = platform
                        , extraCapabilities = extraCapabilities)
  

• Browser Stack - http://www.browserstack.com/

  require(RSelenium)
  user <- "johnharrison" 
  pass <- "******************"
  port <- 80
  ip <- paste0(user, ':', pass, "@hub.browserstack.com")
  extraCapabilities <- list("browser" = "IE",
                        "browser_version" = "7.0",
                        "os" = "Windows",
                        "os_version" = "XP",
                        "browserstack.debug" = "true")
  remDr <- remoteDriver$new(remoteServerAddr = ip, port = port
                        , extraCapabilities = extraCapabilities)
  

testAppScript <- function(remDr){
  remDr$open(); remDr$setImplicitWaitTimeout(2000)
  remDr$navigate("http://spark.rstudio.com/johnharrison/shinytestapp/")
  Sys.sleep(2)
  webElems <- remDr$findElements("css selector", "#ctrlSelect span")
  lapply(webElems, function(x){x$highlightElement()})
  Sys.sleep(2)
  appIds <- c("summary", "distPlot", "ggPlot", "dttable")
  lapply(seq_along(webElems), function(x){
    if(!webElems[[x]]$isElementSelected()[[1]]){
      webElems[[x]]$clickElement()
      # test for its output
      out <- remDr$findElement("id", appIds[x])
      out$highlightElement()
    }})
  remDr$close()
}
testAppScript(remDr)