Selenium Test cases in .Net for Web

Brief:

Selenium automates browsers. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can also be automated as well. Selenium has the support of some of the largest browser vendors who have taken (or are taking) steps to make Selenium a native part of their browser. It is also the core technology in countless other browser automation tools, APIs and frameworks. It provides Web Drivers for Chrome, Firefox, IE & Safari. We can code in C#.

Need:

It's a good practice to test your application before you make it live. So manual testing was done to make sure that everything is fine. But at many times it becomes very difficult to test the same application manually. As a human being we use to get bored for tedious work. To overcome this issue we can write automated test cases through Selenium. We can use these test cases specially for regression testing. This way we can focus on testing of modified functionality and let the test cases test the older functionality. We can also setup these test cases in Jenkins (Continous Integration) server to run it with every code commit in repository. It helps to understand if the latest commit broke  anything.

How It Works:

First of all we need to get the latest version of Selenium Client & WebDriver Language Bindings and the Chrome Driver. Of course, you can download WebDriver bindings for any language (Java, C#, Python, Ruby), but within the scope of this sample project I will use the C# binding only. In the same manner, you can use any browser driver, but here I will use Chrome.

After downloading the libraries and the browser driver we need to include them in our Visual Studio solution:
Creating the scraping program

In order to use the WebDriver in our program we need to add its namespaces:

using OpenQA.Selenium;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome;
using OpenQA.Selenium.Support.UI;

Then, in the main function, we need to initialize the Chrome Driver:

using (var driver = new ChromeDriver())
{

This piece of code searches for the chromedriver.exe file. If this file is located in a directory different from the directory where our program is executed, then we need to specify explicitly its path in the ChromeDriver constructor.

When an instance of ChromeDriver is created, a new Chrome browser will be started. Now we can control this browser via the driver variable. Let’s navigate to the target URL first:

driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://testing-ground.scraping.pro/login");

Then we can find the web page elements needed for us to login in the private area of the website:

var userNameField = driver.FindElementById("usr");
var userPasswordField = driver.FindElementById("pwd");
var loginButton = driver.FindElementByXPath("//input[@value='Login']");

Here we search for user name and password fields and the login button and put them into the corresponding variables. After we have found them, we can type in the user name and the password and press the login button:

userNameField.SendKeys("admin");
userPasswordField.SendKeys("12345");
loginButton.Click();

At this point the new page will be loaded into the browser, and after it’s done we can scrape the text we need and save it into the file:

var result = driver.FindElementByXPath("//div[@id='case_login']/h3").Text;
File.WriteAllText("result.txt", result);