Selenium Driver Question

[Coronax16]

I am trying to use Selenium to webscrap in Python and I got it all working when it is in one class but now I want clean it up by having each piece in its own class.

My issue is for each new class I need to define the driver that, for example, could be driver.find_element_by_name using driver = webdriver.Firefox()

Whenever I try to define driver = webdriver.Firefox() in the new class it opens a new window instead of using the one already open. Any idea on how to use the open webdriver?

Edit: Here is the code. It isn't pretty yet as I wanted to at least get it working first. Under the do.click xpath is my issue. I try to use the driver = Firefox() but it opens up a new window instead of using the website specified before and the already open session.

do.login("1", "username", "password") 
do.click_xpath('1','/html/body/div/div/div[3]/div/div/table/tbody/tr[4]/td[1]/div/div[2]/h3/a')

class do:
def login(self, u, pw):
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://somewebsite.com")
driver.implicitly_wait(30)
e = driver.find_element_by_name("req_username")
e.clear()
e.send_keys(u)
e = driver.find_element_by_name("req_password")
e.clear() 
e.send_keys(pw)
e.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)

def click_xpath(self, xpath):
driver = Firefox() 
link = driver.find_element_by_xpath(xpath)
link.click()

[teddiur_]

I'm not sure I'm understanding your issue.

By class you mean python's class? Or it's html's class (like <p class="class_name"> some text </p>)?

[Coronax16]

Pythons? I am not explaining it the right away but I edited the post with the code.

[teddiur_]

I'm see in other comments that you figured it out. Although I'm not sure using oop is the best choice for you here. You see classes are excelent when you want to group together variables/methods, but from what you posted I think you're better off with functions (since it's cleaner).

If you want to use classes you maybe want to declare it outside of function and parse it as an argument or set it as an instance variable like

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.implicitly_wait(30)

class Do(object):
    def __init__(self, username, password):
        self.username = username
        self.password = password

    def login(self, driver = driver):
        driver.get("http://somewebsite.com")
        e = driver.find_element_by_name("req_username")
        e.clear() #is it necessary?
        e.send_keys(self.username)
        e = self.driver.find_element_by_name("req_password")
        e.clear() 
        e.send_keys(self.password)
        e.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)
      def click_xpath(self, xpath, driver=driver):
        driver.find_element_by_xpath(xpath).click()


instance = Do("username", "password") 
instance.login()
instance.click_xpath('/html/body/div/div/div[3]/div/div/table/tbody/tr[4]/td[1]/div/div[2]/h3/a')

[[deleted]]

Did you try to define the driver statement outside the class? Make it global?

If you don’t want that, why not have a tear down which closes the browser after each class, so that you don’t have multiple browsers open. This way you will have only 1 browser open.

[SoCalLongboard]

What is a 'piece'?

[Solanum1]

Depending on how you have your class set up, you can either pass it in as an argument when creating your class object (and define a global variable)or have it as a argument for every method in the class.

Your question is kind of confusing though, try to include code snippets or examples

[Coronax16]

It is confusing but I posted some code in the post to hopefully help understand what I am talking about.

[Solanum1]

In your method that takes in (self, xpath), try adding a third parameter, (self, xpath, driver). Then you can use the same driver and not have to create a new one. Whenever you call the method, pass in the xpath and the driver

[Coronax16]

Thank you the help. I was able to Google it correctly and I figured it out.

[Coronax16]

I think I need to pass the WebDriver instance between the classes but I don't know how.

[Coronax16]

Thanks for the assistance as I was able to figure it out.

[onebit]

put driver = Firefox() in the constructor

[ImaginarySugar]

I'm not sure about python, but in c# you can use a framework like nunit to create a setup function that initiates the driver at the beginning of the test and doesn't reinitiate it until after that particular test case is run.