How can I send key chords to text area with Selenium?

Question

I would like to simulate a user pressing shift-enter in a text area. Here is the code I am working with:

var driver = new FirefoxDriver();
driver.Navigate().         


        

Answer 1

for me, on c# only this variation works:

actions.KeyDown(Keys.Control);
actions.SendKeys("a");
actions.KeyUp(Keys.Control);

Answer 2

In Java, We have chord method, this method will send sequence of keys together:

textArea.SendKeys( Keys.chord(Keys.Control , "a" ) );

or

textArea.SendKeys( Keys.chord ( Keys.Shift,Keys.Enter ) );

Answer 3

Here's how keys.chord() is implemented in JavaScript: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/blob/d8ddb4d83972df0f565ef65264bcb733e7a94584/javascript/node/selenium-webdriver/lib/input.js#L135

which is already pretty close to the top accepted answer, I think the only difference is the Null character added to the end. You could probably make a helper method to help you remember it, but unfortunately OpenQA.Selenium.Keys is a static class and all of it's properties return strings. So if you wanted to do a nice wrapper around it you'd probably also have to wrap the keys class too.

Answer 4

Simpler than I expected. Since SendKeys takes a string, and the static constants on Keys are all strings they can simply be concatenated together like this:

textarea.SendKeys(Keys.Shift + Keys.Enter);

Answer 5

If there's something that you might do over and over, it may be worth making an extension method for it. I did this since .Clear() doesn't work in our web app for some reason. Instead of always sending a CTRL+A and \b, I just extended it with this:

public static class ExtensionMethods
{
    public static void Blank(this IWebElement _el)
    {
        _el.SendKeys(Keys.Control + "a");
        _el.SendKeys("\b");
    }
}

Then I just call dynEl.Blank(); and it works great.