Capture output from browser call using Selenium

Question

I need to create a use case (using Selenium) in which I send HTTP calls with a Cookie through the browser and capture the return value in a text file.

What do I need to do this, I have run this using CURL in the command line, but we are encountering issues with the same, and hence wish to verify using a real UI browser.

Another thing to this is that I need to get the URL's to be in a test file from which I can read and send to the browser. Then for each call, I need to capture the cookie and the header for the same. I have the following code/logic for this, could someone elaborate?

---> read a file....
File aFile = new File("../blah.txt");

BufferedReader input =  new BufferedReader( new FileReader( aFile ));
String line = null; //not declared within while loop
while (( line = input.readLine()) != null){
    callsel(line);  
    System.out.println(line);
}

--> call selenium .. Open the url.. Pass cookies        
public void callsel(String url) {

    selenium.open(url);
    selenium.waitForPageToLoad("120000");

    selenium.createCookie("","");
    selenium.createCookie("","");
    selenium.open(url);
    selenium.waitForPageToLoad("120000");

    ---> ur page is open now..
    }
}

Answer 1

Not sure if you want to modify the cookie before requesting a page but with this code in Java you will capture all HTML coming back after the request.

String url = "http://host/";

HttpCommandProcessor proc;
proc = new HttpCommandProcessor("localhost", 4444, "*iexplore", url);

Selenium selenium = new DefaultSelenium(proc);

selenium.start();
selenium.open("pageToOpen.htm");

String HTMLOutput = selenium.getHtmlSource();
String BodyOutput = selenium.getBodyText();

Update. Changed your code a bit.. Returning back the body data, just save the tmpString value to a text file and you will have the Body Text(change this is you want all html) back from the page.

---> read a file....
File aFile = new File("../blah.txt");

BufferedReader input =  new BufferedReader( new FileReader( aFile ));
String line = null; //not declared within while loop
while (( line = input.readLine()) != null){
    String tmpString = callsel(line);
    System.out.println("Line: " + line + " HTML:" + tmpString);
}

--> call selenium .. Open the url.. Pass cookies        
public string callsel(String url) {

    selenium.open(url);
    selenium.waitForPageToLoad("120000");

    selenium.createCookie("","");
    selenium.createCookie("","");
    selenium.open(url);
    selenium.waitForPageToLoad("120000");

    return selenium.getBodyText();

    ---> ur page is open now..
    }
}

Answer 2

I would recommend Selenium IDE or Selenium RC for this. In the IDE you can run tests back in Firefox only, but it is a good introduction to Selenium.

The commands you might be most interested in are createCookie, open, and storeHtmlSource. For saving the HTML source to a text file you'll probably want to progress to Selenium RC and implement this in your preferred client language.

Useful links

• Introduction to Selenium IDE
• Introduction to Selenium RC
• Selenium Command Reference