Automate Booking.com Reservation using Selenium.

Below are some notes related to Selenium library to comeback to when needed.

Selenium

Getting started with Testing and Automating using Selenium.

• Automates browsers (As if a real user is operating the browser)
• Test web apps
• Scrape data from websites
• Online bots

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Installation

• Pretty straight forward

  pip install selenium

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Webdriver

• Drives a browser natively (Programming interface)
• Implementation of a browser controlling code.

💡 Selenium provides a dedicated webdriver for each browser

⚠️ We need to download a driver executable that’s compatible with the existing browser version

• After downloading the right browser driver we can either

  • add it’s path to PATH env variable

    • Eg: os.environ['PATH'] += ['path/to/driver/executable']

  • Or

    from selenium import webdriver
    
    # Create chrome service
    chrome_service = webdriver.ChromeService('/path/to/browser/driver')
    
    # pass service to the driver
    driver = webdriver.Chrome(service=chrome_service)

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Waits - Implicit & Explicit

Implicit

• driver.implicitly_wait(time_in_seconds)
• This tells driver that if it can't find the element, wait that specified time_in_seconds before raising an error.
• Implicit wait is set for the life of the WebDriver object

Explicit

• Tells the driver to wait for a certain condition before proceeding further in the code

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.wait import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC


# This will wait maximum 10 seconds.
element = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
    EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, "myDynamicElement"))
)

💡 By default, WebDriverWait calls the ExpectedCondition every 500 milliseconds until it returns success

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Locating elements

• We have 2 methods

  • Both methods take 2 arguments for example: - driver.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, 'class_name') - driver.find_elements(By.NAME, 'element_name') - driver.find_element(By.ID, 'element_id')

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  1. driver.find_element(By, value)

     • This finds the first element that matches the look up criteria.
     • Return WebElement instance.

  2. driver.find_elements(By, value)

     • This finds all elements that matches the look up criteria.
     • Return List of WebElement instances.
  • By class options:
    • find_element(By.ID, "id")
    • find_element(By.NAME, "name")
    • find_element(By.XPATH, "xpath")
    • find_element(By.LINK_TEXT, "link text")
    • find_element(By.PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT, "partial link text")
    • find_element(By.TAG_NAME, "tag name")
    • find_element(By.CLASS_NAME, "class name")
    • find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "css selector")

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  • 💡 Locators Tip
    • It's recommended to separate the locator strings from the place where they are getting used.
    • Locators of the same page belong to the same class.

      #The locators.py will look like this:
      
      from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
  
      class MainPageLocators(object):
          """A class for main page locators. All main page locators should come here"""
  
          GO_BUTTON = (By.ID, 'submit')

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WebElement

    from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys


    element: WebElement = driver.find_element(By.ID, 'my_element')

    # Actions we can perform on Web elements.
    
    element.clear()  # Empty input field.
    
    element.text  # returns content of an element.

    element.get_attribute('attr name')  # returns value of an HTML attribute.

    element.sendKeys('test')  # write text on a field.

    element.sendKeys(Keys.RETURN)  # can take specific keyboard keys from `Keys` class.

    element.sendKeys('test' + Keys.RETURN)  # we can concatenate keys to a string.

    element.click()  # click on it if it's clickable.

    element.submit()  # if it's a form element.

    element.parent  # Return reference to the driver instance this element was found from.
    
    element.tag_name  # Return tag name of an element 
    
    element.id  # Return internal ID used by selenium.

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