htmlunit-driver - how to simulate drag-and-drop?

Question

Is there a way to simulate a drag-and-drop with htmlunit-driver?

When using Actions it throws an UnsupportedException

  @Override
  public void mouseMove(Coordinates where, long xOffset, long yOffset) {
    throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Moving to arbitrary X,Y coordinates not supported.");
  }

My attempts for trying to do this:

first attempt

(new Actions(driver)).dragAndDropBy(sliderHandle, 50, 0)
                     .build()
                     .perform();

second attempt

(new Actions(driver)).moveToElement(sliderHandle)
                     .clickAndHold()
                     .moveToElement(sliderHandle, 50, 0)
                     .release()
                     .build()
                     .perform();

Is there a workaround for this?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 21 '17 at 14:34

HtmlUnit is a GUI-Less browser for Java programs that can do a lot for us, but not everything. And, as you have noticed, it has no support for operations such as drag and drop

new UnsupportedOperationException("Moving to arbitrary X,Y coordinates not supported.");

contrary to other Selenium drivers, like selenium-chromedriver, in which one your example should work fine.

However, if you still need it to work with a headless web testing, there's an option with PhantomJS. Yes, it is focused for JS testing, but there is a great project called Ghost Driver (a implementation of Webdriver Wire protocol in simple JS for PhantomJS) that enables Java bindings along with Selenium API.

The steps to use it are very simple:

Install PhantomJS in your OS and add the executable file to your PATH env variable properly.

Add the Maven dependency to your pom.xml (along with Selenium libs: selenium-java and selenium-support):

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.github.detro</groupId>
    <artifactId>phantomjsdriver</artifactId>
    <version>1.2.0</version>
</dependency>

And adapt your code to make use of it:

// Set this property, in order to specify path that PhantomJS executable will use
System.setProperty("phantomjs.binary.path", System.getenv("PHANTOM_JS") + "/bin/phantomjs.exe");

// New PhantomJS driver from ghostdriver
WebDriver driver = new PhantomJSDriver();
driver.get("https://jqueryui.com/resources/demos/draggable/default.html");

// Find draggable element
WebElement draggable = driver.findElement(By.id("draggable"));

System.out.println("x: " + draggable.getLocation().x 
        + ", y: " + draggable.getLocation().y);

// Perform drag and drop
(new Actions(driver)).dragAndDropBy(draggable, 50, 0)
    .build()
    .perform();

System.out.println("x: " + draggable.getLocation().x 
        + ", y: " + draggable.getLocation().y);

Final output:

x: 8, y: 8
x: 58, y: 8

I have switched my test to now use the PhantomJSDriver. The only downside about using the PhantomJSDriver is that it requires PhantomJS to be installed on the computer running the tests whereas the HtmlUnit one does not have this requirement. — stefaan dutry, Jan 22 '17 at 13:10
Yes, that's a coupling you should have for this. But, as I said, HtmlUnit is not the silver bullet, it has limitations based on different approaches. I'd suggest you take a look at those: [What are the limitations of Headless(HtmlUnitDriver) browser testing in selenium?](http://sqa.stackexchange.com/questions/17233/what-are-the-limitations-of-headlesshtmlunitdriver-browser-testing-in-selenium) and [Selenium vs HtmlUnit?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12807689/selenium-vs-htmlunit) — diogo, Jan 22 '17 at 14:11
thank you for this info. I have currently found away around the problem of the phantomjs requirement by using profiles and categories for the tests. (and adding a build step with the profile for the phantomjs ones on the build server.) — stefaan dutry, Jan 22 '17 at 14:58

htmlunit-driver - how to simulate drag-and-drop?

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