Sharing same selenium WebDriver between step definition files

Question

Right now we\'re working on adopting Cucumber to run functional tests on our Java8/Spring app. We want our step definition files to remain as DRY as possible and as such pla

Answer 1

This question is old, and I left the project shortly after asking this question, but I went back and looked at the code we put in place (using the singleton pattern) and this is what we ended up with. I forget exactly why we couldn't use pico-container (it was possibly an organizational constraint) but if you can use extra libraries I remember that solution worked well.

I will leave that as the accepted answer but hopefully this solution is useful for those who find themselves in a similar position that I was in a few years ago.

public class TestingBase {

    private static TestingBase instance;
    private static WebDriver driver;
    private static Thread CLOSE_DRIVER = new Thread() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            driver.close();
        }

    };

    static {
        Runtime.getRuntime().addShutdownHook(CLOSE_DRIVER);
    }

    private TestingBase() {
        DesiredCapabilities desiredCapabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
        desiredCapabilities.setJavascriptEnabled(true);
        desiredCapabilities.setCapability("takesScreenshot", false);
        desiredCapabilities.setCapability("handlesAlerts", true);

        desiredCapabilities.setCapability(PhantomJSDriverService.PHANTOMJS_CLI_ARGS, new String[]{
                "--web-security=false",
                "--ssl-protocol=TLSv1",
                "--ignore-ssl-errors=true",
                "--webdriver-loglevel=ERROR",
                "--webdriver-logfile=/var/log/phantomjs/ghostrdriver.log"
        });
        desiredCapabilities.setCapability("elementScrollBehavior",true);
        driver = new PhantomJSDriver(desiredCapabilities);
    }

    public static TestingBase getTestingBase() {
        if (instance == null) {
            instance = new TestingBase();
        }
        return instance;

    }

    public static WebDriver getDriver() {
        return getTestingBase().driver;
    }
}

Answer 2

I reccomend you to use pico-container as a dependency injection framework to use with cucumber-jvm.

With PicoContainer, you can have a 'base' class with the instance of WebDriver, and then pass this base class automactically to any other class. Or even you could pass directly the web driver if you prefer.

<dependency>
    <groupId>info.cukes</groupId>
    <artifactId>cucumber-picocontainer</artifactId>
    <version>1.2.3</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

Example:

Base class with the instance of WebDriver:

public class ContextSteps {

   private static boolean initialized = false;

   private WebDriver driver;

   @Before
   public void setUp() throws Exception {
      if (!initialized) {
         // initialize the driver
         driver = = new FirefoxDriver();

         initialized = true;
      }
   }

   public WebDriver getDriver() {
      return driver;
   }
}

Other class who access webDriver through pico-container DI.

public class OtherClassSteps {

   private ContextSteps contextSteps;

   // PicoContainer injects class ContextSteps
   public OtherClassSteps (ContextSteps contextSteps) {
      this.contextSteps = contextSteps;
   }


   @Given("^Foo step$")
   public void fooStep() throws Throwable {
      // Access WebDriver instance
      WebDriver driver = contextSteps.getDriver();
   }
}

Hope it helps.