Selenium IDE 2.9.1 in Firefox: Unexpected Exception

Kenneth Johnson

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Jan 25, 2017, 11:25:14 PM1/25/17

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I have successfully used the Selenium IDE with Mozilla Firefox for Windows for about four years to perform simple tests of a small corporate website after software upgrades. My procedure has been to apply the upgrades to my test environment, then run a Selenium test suite. If it passes, repeat both steps for the live site. Most of the tests are 'Open a page, verify limited content'; a few require very limited input from the test operator.

This week it happened that some software upgrades dropped shortly after a successful run of the tests against the live site. I applied the upgrades to the test environment, and ran the test suite. There were several unexpected errors. I tried running the test suite against the live site, (no site changes since last pass), and that failed too.

My current Firefox version is 51.0 (32-bit). It seems quite possible that version has changed since the last successful run of the tests against the live site. In the past, this process has kept working through many Firefox updates.

Here's the error text:

"[error] Unexpected Exception: Error: cross-process JS call failed"

For background, here's the simplest test case I have found that reproduces this error:

Start Firefox with one tab open to the Mozilla Firefox Start Page.

Select Selenium IDE from the Tools menu.

Open the script shown below.

Run the script.

I request advice from Selenium users more advanced/experienced than I. If there is a known easy fix, point me at it. If not, I request pointers for how I might use other parts of the Selenium toolkit (which I have not previously explored) to get a similar job done. I am competent in Python if that helps.

Thanks,

Ken

=====

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head profile="http://selenium-ide.openqa.org/profiles/test-case">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<link rel="selenium.base" href="https://www.google.com/" />
<title>Google Search</title>
</head>
<body>
<table cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" border="1">
<thead>
<tr><td rowspan="1" colspan="3">Google Search</td></tr>
</thead><tbody>

<tr>
<tr>
    <td>open</td>
    <td>/</td>
    <td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
    <td>storeEval</td>
    <td>prompt("Enter your search term")</td>
    <td>searchTerm</td>
</tr>
<tr>
    <td>type</td>
    <td>name=q</td>
    <td>${searchTerm}</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</body>
</html>

Mariusz Purwin

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Jan 30, 2017, 2:29:11 AM1/30/17

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Hi,

We had same problem. SeleniumIDE: Flow Control solved our problem.

Could you install it?

https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/flow-control/

Kenneth Johnson

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Jan 30, 2017, 4:08:04 PM1/30/17

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That fixed it. Thanks!

Jeffrey Smith

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Jan 30, 2017, 9:39:01 PM1/30/17

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Hi Mariusz,

WOW! Talk about timing. You are a life saver. I've been stressing over this exact same issue for a day and a half. Was just about to submit an issue to Selenium when I cam across this. Tried it and, VOILA! Everything is working again. Just want to say think and your answer is much appreciated.

Thanks,
-jt