Is there any way to start with a POST request using Selenium

Question

I m trying to start a Selenium test with a POST request to my application   Instead of a simple open  startpoint   I would like to do something like open  startpoint  stuff foo stuff2 bar   Is there any way to do that   I m asking this because the original page which posts to this start point depends on external providers that are often offline  development environment  and so will often fail too early  and are not the subject of the test     I guess sending data as GET would work too  I would just prefer using a POST method

User · Answer

One very practical way to do this is to create a dummy start page for your tests that is simply a form with POST that has a single "start test" button and a bunch of <input type="hidden"... elements with the appropriate post data.

For example you might create a SeleniumTestStart.html page with these contents:

<body>
  <form action="/index.php" method="post">
    <input id="starttestbutton" type="submit" value="starttest"/>
    <input type="hidden" name="stageid" value="stage-you-need-your-test-to-start-at"/>
  </form>
</body>

In this example, index.php is where your normal web app is located.

The Selenium code at the start of your tests would then include:

open /SeleniumTestStart.html
clickAndWait starttestbutton

This is very similar to other mock and stub techniques used in automated testing. You are just mocking the entry point to the web app.

Obviously there are some limitations to this approach:

data cannot be too large (e.g. image data)
security might be an issue so you need to make sure that these test files don't end up on your production server
you may need to make your entry points with something like php instead of html if you need to set cookies before the Selenium test gets going
some web apps check the referrer to make sure someone isn't hacking the app - in this case this approach probably won't work - you may be able to loosen this checking in a dev environment so it allows referrers from trusted hosts (not self, but the actual test host)

Please consider reading my article about the Qualities of an Ideal Test

User · Answer

If you are using Python selenium bindings  nowadays  there is an extension to selenium - selenium-requests      Extends Selenium WebDriver classes to include the request function   from the Requests library  while doing all the needed cookie and   request headers handling    Example   from seleniumrequests import Firefox  webdriver   Firefox   response   webdriver request  POST    url here   data   param1    value1    print response

User · Answer

Selenium doesn t currently offer API for this  but there are several ways to initiate an HTTP request in your test  It just depends what language you are writing in   In Java for example  it might look like this      setup the request String request    startpoint stuff1 foo amp stuff2 bar   URL url   new URL request   HttpURLConnection connection    HttpURLConnection  url openConnection    connection setRequestMethod  POST        get a response - maybe  success  or  true   XML or JSON etc  InputStream inputStream   connection getInputStream    BufferedReader bufferedReader   new BufferedReader new InputStreamReader inputStream    String line  StringBuffer response   new StringBuffer    while   line   bufferedReader readLine       null        response append line       response append   r      bufferedReader close        continue with test if  response toString   equals  expected response           do selenium

User · Answer

from selenium import webdriver  driver   webdriver Firefox   driver implicitly wait 12  driver set page load timeout 10   def  post selenium self  url  str  data  dict       input template     k   lt input type  quot text quot  name  quot  k  quot  id  quot  k  quot  value  quot  v  quot  gt  lt BR gt  n      inputs    quot  quot      if data          for k  v in data items                inputs    input template format k k  v v      html   f  lt html gt  lt body gt  n lt form action  quot  url  quot  method  quot post quot  id  quot formid quot  gt  n inputs  lt input type  quot submit quot  id  quot inputbox quot  gt  n lt  form gt  lt  body gt  lt  html gt        html file   os path join os getcwd     temp html       with open html file   quot w quot   as text file          text file write html       driver get f quot file    html file  quot       driver find element by id  inputbox   click     post selenium  quot post to my site url quot     quot field1 quot    quot val1 quot     driver close

User · Answer

Well  i agree with the  Mishkin Berteig - Agile Coach answer  Using the form is the quick way to use the POST features   Anyway  i see some mention about javascript  but no code  I have that for my own needs  which includes jquery for easy POST plus others   Basically  using the driver execute script   you can send any javascript  including Ajax queries     usr local env python   - - coding  utf8 - -   proxy is used to inspect data involved on the request without so much code    using a basic http written in python  u can found it there  http   voorloopnul com blog a-python-proxy-in-less-than-100-lines-of-code   import selenium from selenium import webdriver import requests from selenium webdriver common proxy import Proxy  ProxyType  jquery   open  jquery min js    r   read    print jquery  proxy   Proxy   proxy proxy type   ProxyType MANUAL proxy http proxy    127 0 0 1 3128  proxy socks proxy    127 0 0 1 3128  proxy ssl proxy    127 0 0 1 3128   capabilities   webdriver DesiredCapabilities PHANTOMJS proxy add to capabilities capabilities   driver   webdriver PhantomJS desired capabilities capabilities   driver get  http   httpbin org   driver execute script jquery    ensure we have jquery  ajax query                     post   post                      a      s                    b      s                                     1 2   ajax query   ajax query replace          replace   n       print ajax query  result   driver execute script  return     ajax query   print result   print driver page source  driver close      this retuns that from the proxy  and is OK     POST http   httpbin org post HTTP 1 1 Accept      Referer  http   httpbin org  Origin  http   httpbin org X-Requested-With  XMLHttpRequest User-Agent  Mozilla 5 0  Windows NT 6 2  WOW64  AppleWebKit 538 1  KHTML  like Gecko  PhantomJS 2 0 0 Safari 538 1 Content-Type  application x-www-form-urlencoded  charset UTF-8 Content-Length  7 Cookie   ga GAxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx   gat 1 Connection  Keep-Alive Accept-Encoding  gzip  deflate Accept-Language  es-ES en   Host  httpbin org   None a 1 amp b 2   lt  lt ---- that is OK  is the data contained into the POST None

User · Answer

Selenium IDE allows you to run Javascript using storeEval command  Mentioned above solution works fine if you have test page  HTML  not XML  and you need to perform only POST request   If you need to make POST PUT DELETE or any other request then you will need another approach   XMLHttpRequest   Example listed below has been tested - all methods  POST PUT DELETE  work just fine    lt  --variables-- gt   lt tr gt       lt td gt store lt  td gt       lt td gt  your target script php lt  td gt       lt td gt targetUrl lt  td gt   lt  tr gt   lt tr gt       lt td gt store lt  td gt       lt td gt user user1 amp amp password lt  td gt       lt td gt requestParams lt  td gt   lt  tr gt   lt tr gt       lt td gt store lt  td gt       lt td gt POST lt  td gt       lt td gt requestMethod lt  td gt   lt  tr gt   lt  --scenario-- gt   lt tr gt       lt td gt storeEval lt  td gt       lt td gt window location host lt  td gt       lt td gt host lt  td gt   lt  tr gt   lt tr gt       lt td gt store lt  td gt       lt td gt http     host  lt  td gt       lt td gt baseUrl lt  td gt   lt  tr gt   lt tr gt       lt td gt store lt  td gt       lt td gt   baseUrl   targetUrl  lt  td gt       lt td gt absoluteUrl lt  td gt   lt  tr gt   lt tr gt       lt td gt store lt  td gt       lt td gt   absoluteUrl    requestParams  lt  td gt       lt td gt requestUrl lt  td gt   lt  tr gt   lt tr gt       lt td gt storeEval lt  td gt       lt td gt var method storedVars  requestMethod    var url   storedVars  requestUrl    loadXMLDoc url  method   function loadXMLDoc url  method    var xmlhttp   new XMLHttpRequest    xmlhttp onreadystatechange function     if  xmlhttp readyState  4    if xmlhttp status  200    alert  amp quot Results    amp quot    xmlhttp responseText    else   alert  amp quot Error  amp quot   xmlhttp responseText        amp nbsp  amp nbsp xmlhttp open method url true   xmlhttp send      lt  td gt       lt td gt  lt  td gt   lt  tr gt    Clarification     requestParams  - parameters you would like to post  e g  param1 value1 amp param2 value3 amp param1 value3  you may specify as many parameters as you need    targetUrl  - path to your script  if your have page located at http   domain com application update php then targetUrl should be equal to  application update php     requestMethod  - method type  in this particular case it should be  POST  but can be  PUT  or  DELETE  or any other

User · Answer

Short answer  No   But you might be able to do it with a bit of filthing  If you open up a test page  with GET  then evaluate some JavaScript on that page you should be able to replicate a POST request  See JavaScript post request like a form submit to see how you can replicate a POST request in JavaScript   Hope this helps

[selenium] Is there any way to start with a POST request using Selenium?

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