Using selenium from within my app without any external server

Question

From within my app I want to hit a website and than perform user action. Currently am using webview but I think webdriver will be easy to use and correct approach.

Current code:

WebView browser = (WebView) view.findViewById(R.id.webview);
browser.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
browser.getSettings().setDomStorageEnabled(true);
browser.getSettings().setUserAgentString(`"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.81 Safari/537.36");`
browser.setWebViewClient(new MyBrowser());
browser.loadUrl("https://myurl.com");

Issues with current code: Its hard to send key stores or use Xpath.

What am looking for? Hit the website using driver and than click buttons etc. Pseudo code as follows:

chat=driver.find_element_by_xpath("/html/somepath")
chat.click()
time.sleep(2)      
search=driver.find_element_by_xpath("/html/body/div[1]/div/div/div[2]/div[1]/span/div/span/div/div[1]/div/label/input")
search.click()

I understand that this is possible using selenium/appium. But what am confused is does selenium/appium also needs a server that runs on a separate machine? I want to run all of the code in my app without external server or any more apps.

Can I just add lib which gives me access to apis like I showed above?

Answer 1

You can use the Selenium or Appium without any server. Both are plugins, which means they are basically open code or libraries. You call those objects on your local machine (or phone), you don't call an online remote API.

The Selenium and Appium helps to find elements on a web page or to find elements inside a mobile app. There is absolutely no need for a server here or remote machine.

So, YES, just add the lib which gives you access to api's like you showed above.

Answer 2

Selenium

Selenium in it's basic form doesn't needs any seperate server to run. Selenium along with it's wide range of tools and libraries that can support the automation of web browsers within the same machine ( i.e. localhost).

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WebDriver

At the core of Selenium is WebDriver an interface to write instruction sets that can be run interchangeably in many browsers using each browser's native support for Test Automation. This can be achieved in three simple steps:

• Installing the Selenium library
• Installing the browser drivers
• Writing your first Selenium script

Sample code block:

System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "/path/to/geckodriver");
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
driver.get("https://www.amazon.com/");
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("input.nav-input[value='Go']")).click();

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Selenium Grid

However, Selenium also supports a distribution server for scaling browser allocation. If your usecase include steps to run tests in parallel across multiple machines, then Selenium Grid would be your best bet.

Selenium Grid allows the execution of WebDriver scripts on remote machines (virtual or real) by routing commands sent by the client to remote browser instances. It aims to provide an easy way to run tests in parallel on multiple machines.

Selenium Grid would also allow you to run tests in parallel on multiple machines and to manage different browser versions and browser configurations centrally (instead of in each individual test).

Having said that, it does solves a subset of common delegation and distribution problems, but will may not be able to manage your infrastructure, and might not exactly suit to your specific need.

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Appium

Similarly, Appium is an open-source tool for automating native, mobile web, and hybrid applications on iOS mobile, Android mobile, and Windows desktop platforms. Hybrid apps which have a wrapper around a webview is a native control that enables interaction with web content. Projects like Apache Cordova make it easier to build apps using web technologies that are then bundled into a native wrapper, creating a hybrid app.

Answer 3

Based on your question and your response comment to the answer provided by @undetectedSelenium, the following assumptions apply:

1. You are testing a browser within an android phone that is connected to a Windows machine via an adb server running on the Windows machine
2. The browser under test is Chrome

Install selenium as part of your project:

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
        <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
        <version>4.1.2</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

Sample code block based on your psuedo code and answer provided by @undetectedSelenium

System.setProperty(“webdriver.chrome.driver”, “C:\\path\\to\\chromedriver.exe”);
ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.setExperimentalOption(“androidPackage”, “com.android.chrome”);

// By default if the following option is not applied, selenium will take the 1st available
// node provided by the adb server if multiple android devices are attached
options.setExperimentalOption("androidDeviceSerial", deviceId);

WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);
driver.get("https://www.amazon.com/");
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("input.nav-input[value='Go']")).click();

The deviceId variable needs to contain the uuid listed as a device from the adb server for the particular device under test, i.e.

options.setExperimentalOption("androidDeviceSerial", 95s572sp0478);

Also you will require the correct Chromedriver for your android device. Check the version of Chrome browser installed on the device and download the correct driver from here for your Windows machine Chromedriver Downloads. Then place into your desired directory and add the directory path into the code.