Bogdan Gusiev's blog

Upload files with Selenium IDE

03 Apr 2009

I started using selenium about 2 weeks ago. Find it as a very good QA tool. But after a few successfully written tests I met the problem: Selenium is not able to use file input field. JavaScript permission restriction doesn't allow it.

Here is my solution written with JInvoke library: Jinvoke provides the classes to simulate the input to file chooser form.

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The problem I meat is selenium is stuck when simulate the click on upload file input. I have to launch the concurent thread that do the file name input. Thread code(Note file name should be given in Java format like 'c:/boot.ini):

import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.event.KeyEvent;
import java.awt.*;

/**
 * @author Bogdan Gusiev
 *         Date 29.03.2009
 */
public class FileChooserThread extends Thread {

    public FileChooserThread(String file) {
        super(new FileRunner(file));
    }
}

class FileRunner implements Runnable {

    private String fullName;

    public FileRunner(String fileName) {
        this.fullName = fileName;
    }

    public void run() {
        try {
            Thread.sleep(1000);
            Robot robot = new Robot(); //input simulation class
            for (char c : fullName.toCharArray()) {
                if (c == ':') {
                    robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_SHIFT);
                    robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_SEMICOLON);
                    robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_SHIFT);
                } else if (c == '/') {
                    robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_BACK_SLASH);
                } else {
                    robot.keyPress(KeyStroke.getKeyStroke(
                                   Character.toUpperCase(c), 0).getKeyCode());
                }
            }
            robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_ENTER);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
    }

}

Here is selenium call method:

protected void chooseFile(String element, String fileName) {
           Number positionLeft = selenium.getElementPositionLeft(element);
           Number positionTop = selenium.getElementPositionTop(element);
           new FileChooserThread(fileName).start(); //launch input thread.
           //this method will held current thread while FileChooser gives the file name
           selenium.clickAt("file", positionLeft + "," + positionTop); 
}

selenium java