Selenium VBA - Previously working now failing...

[Ben Holmes]

I have selenium VBA script that i've been running for a while now with zero issues.

But now (overnight) it fails and i cannot understand why. Even basic scripts now fail and i've reinstalled Selenium Wrapper and firefox to be sure it wasn't issues with them...

The error i get is either: 

The system cannot find specified file:

driver.Start "firefox", "http://www.google.com"    ' Start Browser

or similarly here in another simple test script:

Wrong number of arguments or invalid property assignment: 

driver.Start "firefox", "http://www.google.com"

I also saw an activex cannot create a component error but can't seem to repeat that now!?

Any ideas please? again everything had been working fine for weeks?

Thanks in advance

[Ben Holmes]

After reinstalling everything a number of times i've tried changing "firefox" to "ie" or "chrome". 

When i do this, it doesn't fail and launches the browser - Great. Which makes me think that somewhere there must be a setting that registers "firefox" with firefox and that has changed to soemthing new?

Does this help, or does anybody know?

Thanks

[David]

You probably want to submit an issue under the Selenium VBA project for this. You'll get best support that way.

Anything change on your environment recently or a Firefox upgrade? Might want to test on a another computer (preferably one without Selenium VBA and FF installed for a clean setup).

As a worse case alternative, you also have the option of using this: http://htejera.users.sourceforge.net/vbswebdriver/. This option is preferable if you don't need ActiveX/COM (only using VBScript) as it's one less dependency. You would have to run a Selenium server JAR instance though.

[Ben Holmes]

Hi David, thanks for responding to me.

Yes, i will submit the question to the Selenium VBA project. If there is no joy with that, i'm going to wipe my computer clean and do what you suggested. Little concerned about doing that incase the same issue occurs again in X weeks..

The version of FF is 27 and i have it set to not look for updates or update. Newer versions didn't work. 

If i find the answer, i will post an update to this thread

Thanks again

Ben

[Nick Mitchell]

I am able to use Selenium to open a webDriver instance (Firefox), however it will then not respond. It doesn't insert my url nor perform any further actions on the site. The script I am using works just fine on Mac OSX, but the issue I described in on Windows 8. Initially occurred with 32-bit Python, I have upgraded to 64-bit and also the same with Firefox (32 to 64 bit). No difference.

I was using a custom profile and reading that it, and the error message was reading (at timeout) that selenium (or Python itself) was not able to load the profile, however the paths were unchanged from the working script. I have also tried with no custom profile which also isn't working.

I am now attempting a new install of Firefox once again and will then attempt using other browswers to see exactly where the broken link lies.

All ideas, assistance and updates from you all would be appreciated!

[David]

Nick, seems like you are hijacking this thread. Better to post your own new thread? Your issue doesn't sound like Selenium VBA (or COM/ActiveX, Visual Basic) related, which is what this thread is about. FYI, Selenium VBA is this: http://florentbr.github.io/SeleniumBasic/

[Nick Mitchell]

It's not a VBA issue, but my programme is also crashing around the same point when the Firefox-driver is being loaded by Selenium, and this was the most recent thread I found with the same topic, so I am wondering if it is a selenium-firefox problem...?

[Nick Mitchell]

I did exactly the same, moved to Chrome! It has been working, although somewhat erratically for me. I think those problems relate to my system and script though, so I won't go into them here. I do prefer Firefox, using custom profiles which in my mind are more flexible than those, which one can make in Chrome.

As another alternative that I'm looking into, there is a package called PhantomJS, which is able to work as a driver like Firefox or Chrome through Selenium, which doesn't actually open a GUI (i.e. no visibly browser opens), so should be faster. I saw some examples where tests ran ~25% faster.

There is a short example on youtube if you search for PhantomJS. Also, a good stackoverflow page, for me at least, using Python. Would be great for me as I need to do a lot with the page I'm scraping so time and RAM become issues!

On 23 Sep 2015 00:58, "Ben Holmes" <benhol...@outlook.com> wrote:

Hi Nick, it sounds similar to the issue i'm seeing. I tested the latest version of Selenium Wrapper and many different versions of FF to no avail. I also tried initializing the Global browser variables and then setting them within the sub where you start them. That's probably best practice and i wasn't doing it before - but again it didn't help.

What did work was changing the browser to chrome. I don't need to use FF but it seemed preferable because IDE. That said, chrome seems faster and everything is fine...

Not a fix. more of a work around

Ben 

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Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2015 13:13:31 -0700
From: nickmi...@googlemail.com
To: seleniu...@googlegroups.com
CC: benhol...@outlook.com
Subject: Re: Selenium VBA - Previously working now failing...