Send key to browser (not element)

[BigSean]

Hi there,

I'm trying to write a test that verifies auto-focus behavior. That
is, when you click a button, a form pops open, and I want to make sure
the cursor has been configured to be typing in the first field.

I've tried the following code, but no luck:
btn.click();
Thread.sleep(2000);
new Actions(driver).sendKeys("The Title");

I've verified that the cursor is in the text field that I want to type
into when this command runs, but still no keys show up in the field.

I'm using the FIrefoxDriver with Firefox 10.0.1.

Is there anything else I can try?

Thanks!
-Sean

[Danny Guerrier]

You still need to find the element before you interact with it.

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[Abhijeet Bedagkar]

try this code worked for me

driver.SwitchTo().ActiveElement().SendKeys("Text");

this will put the text in the current active element.

Thanks
Abhijeet

Automation Engineer

[Sean Adkinson]

@Danny

The problem is that if I find the element and send keys to it, the focus changes to that element, so I can't verify it already had focus.

@Abhijeet

Thank you, that works pretty well.  I still wish there was a way to simply send keys, though, because the next thing I wanted to do was to press TAB and continue typing.  I can achieve this by doing the following:

driver.switchTo().activeElement().sendKeys("The Title" + Keys.TAB);

driver.switchTo().activeElement().sendKeys("The Description");

I was hoping I could just type ("The Title" + Keys.TAB + "The Description"), but this isn't too bad.

Thanks!

-Sean

[Danny Guerrier]

Maybe you can use the javaScript executor with 

document.activeElement

Never tried it. 

--

[Simon Stewart]

Try to send the keyboard events to the body element (find By.tagName("body"))

Simon

[Chema del Barco]

Hey Simon,

Related to this... How would you do that for a pdf opened in a
browser? I tried every solution but none worked. I mean:
1) Opening a pdf in a browser
2) Press "Control" + "A" to get all the text
3) Press "Control" + "C" to copy the text to the clipboard

Thanks!

[Simon Stewart]

WebDriver doesn't support automating PDF viewers in browsers. If you
need to work with PDFs, the best thing is to download it to the local
machine (possibly by setting firefox to always download pdfs to a
known location) and then use a library suitable for working with that
document type.

Simon

[Ramki Thirunahari]

Hi Sean,

Do you still have the working code of this? can you please share full code with me?

Thanks,

Ramki

[Snehal Biche]

kind of this below works for me -

you need to wrap your driver to Action driver and use sendKeys this will actually dont check element is present or not.

(new Actions(driver)).sendKeys("ReplaceWithYourElement").perform();

-Snehal