Today we're examining the captureNetworkTraffic selenium command, a little known gem in Selenium's command list.
Selenium offers a feature, captureNetworkTraffic, which allows you to intercept the network traffic as seen by the browser running your test. The response includes headers, status codes, timings and AJAX requests. It's especially useful if you're debugging requests in your browser.
An example on how to use this in ruby:
require "rubygems"
gem "selenium-client"
require "selenium/client"
gem 'test-unit'
require 'test/unit'
gem "testingbot"
require "testingbot"
class ExampleTest < TestingBot::TestCase
attr_reader :browser
def setup
@browser = Selenium::Client::Driver.new \
:host => "hub.testingbot.com",
:port => 4444,
:browser => "firefox",
:version => "8",
:platform => "WINDOWS",
:url => "http://www.google.com",
:timeout_in_second => 60
browser.start_new_browser_session(:captureNetworkTraffic => true)
end
def teardown
browser.close_current_browser_session
end
def test_command
browser.open "/"
p browser.browser_network_traffic
end
endThis will open Google in Firefox 8 and return the network traffic. An example of a response would be:
"403 GET http://localhost:5555/favicon.ico1333 bytes 94ms
(2011-12-21T15:53:06.352+0100 - 2011-12-21T15:53:06.446+0100
Request Headers - Host => localhost:5555 -
User-Agent => Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101
Firefox/8.0.1 - Accept => image/png,image/*;q=0.8,*/*;q=0.5 -
Accept-Language => en-us,en;q=0.5 - Accept-Encoding => gzip, deflate - Accept-Charset => ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 -
Proxy-Connection => keep-aliveResponse Headers - Date => Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:53:06 GMT -
Server => Jetty/5.1.x (Windows 7/6.1 x86 java/1.6.0_26 - Content-Type => text/html -
Content-Length => 1333 - Via => 1.1 (jetty)
This command is available on our Grid and can be used to debug requests and calculate how long a request takes.
