Selenium atoms

Marionette uses a small list of Selenium atoms to interact with web elements. Initially those have been added to ensure a better reliability due to a wider usage inside the Selenium project. But by adding full support for the WebDriver specification they will be removed step by step.

Currently the following atoms are in use:

  • getElementText

  • isDisplayed

To use one of those atoms Javascript modules will have to import atom.js.

Update required Selenium atoms

In regular intervals the atoms, which are still in use, have to be updated. Therefore they have to be exported from the Selenium repository first, and then updated in atom.js.

Export Selenium Atoms

The canonical GitHub repository for Selenium is

https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium.git

so make sure to have a local copy of it. For the cloning process it is recommended to specify the --depth=1 argument, so only the last changeset is getting downloaded (which itself will already be more than 100 MB). Once the clone is ready the export of the atoms can be triggered by running the following commands:

% cd selenium
% ./go
% python buck-out/crazy-fun/%changeset%/buck.pex build --show-output %atom%

Hereby %changeset% corresponds to the currently used version of buck, and %atom% to the atom to export. The following targets for exporting are available:

  • //javascript/webdriver/atoms:clear-element-firefox

  • //javascript/webdriver/atoms:get-text-firefox

  • //javascript/webdriver/atoms:is-displayed-firefox

  • //javascript/webdriver/atoms:is-enabled-firefox

  • //javascript/webdriver/atoms:is-selected-firefox

For each of the exported atoms a file can now be found in the folder buck-out/gen/javascript/webdriver/atoms/. They contain all the code including dependencies for the atom wrapped into a single function.

Update atom.js

To update the atoms for Marionette the atoms.js file has to be edited. For each atom to be updated the steps as laid out below have to be performed:

  1. Open the Javascript file of the exported atom. See above for its location.

  2. Remove the contained license header, which can be found somewhere in the middle of the file.

  3. Update the parameters of the wrapper function (at the very top) so that those are equal with the used parameters in atom.js.

  4. Copy the whole content of the file, and replace the existing code for the atom in atom.js.

Test the changes

To ensure that the update of the atoms doesn’t cause a regression a try build should be run including Marionette unit tests, Firefox ui tests, and all the web-platform-tests.