OCRUG Webinar

How Would You Save a Screenshot to File Using RSelenium?

In the seminar I suggested that the Selenium webdriver returned the png in a base 64 encoded format. I tried to save the output to file using writeBin and remarked that I probably needed to decode the output. So here is what I should have done:

b64out <- remDr$screenshot()
writeBin(base64Decode(b64out, "raw"), 'nameoffile.png')

How Would You Use a Chrome Profile?

In the seminar I remarked that the google chrome browser had hundreds of startup options. They are actually termed command line switches. The two I was after were --user-data-dir and --profile-directory. It would then have been sufficient to use:

args = list(
  paste0('--user-data-dir=',dataDir),
  paste0('--profile-directory=',profileDir)
)
cprof <- list(chromeOptions = list(args = args))
remDr <- remoteDriver(
  browserName = 'chrome',
  extraCapabilities = cprof
)

Added to RSelenium

I added the above functionality to RSelenium. So now the screenshot method of the remoteDriver class has an optional file argument. If display is FALSE and a file argument is given RSelenium will now save the png to file.

Secondly there is now a getChromeProfile utility function in a similar vein to the existing getFirefoxProfile function. The function is documented in the RSelenium package. Its basic usage is as follows:

# example from windows using a profile directory "Profile 1"
dataDir <- "C:\\Users\\john\\AppData\\Local\\Google\\Chrome\\User Data"
cprof <- getChromeProfile(dataDir, "Profile 1")
remDr <- remoteDriver(browserName = "chrome", extraCapabilities = cprof)

So it takes two arguments: a users chrome data directory and the profile directory within that data directory from which you want to run.

I will update the version of RSelenium on CRAN in the coming weeks. If you would like to run the dev version with added features you can install it with:

devtools::install_github("johndharrison/RSelenium")

and remember to file any issues you may have. to github so RSelenium can improve as a package :).

SauceLabs Test Results

At the end of the webinar the simple test on the shinytestapp was ran against multiple OS and browsers using Sauce Labs as an external provider for the selenium server and the browsers. These test results can be seen bu navigating to the RSelenium Sauce Labs page https://saucelabs.com/u/rselenium0 and searching for OCRUG TEST 1 in the search session name panel.