VBA + Selenium keep browser open after test

[hunsnowboarder02]

Hi there!

I have a very frustrating problem. Each time I run the test in VBA, after the test is run the webpage is closed. However I do not have quit or exit command.

Could someone please let me know how to leave the webpage as it is, without closing it?

Thank you in advance!

My code:

Sub Toto_Szerencsejatek()

  Dim my_url As String
  Dim driver As New Selenium.WebDriver

  my_url = "http://www.szerencsejatek.hu/toto"

  driver.Start "firefox", my_url
  driver.Get my_url

End Sub

[PeterJeffreyGale .]

It's possibly VBA's garbage collection routine killing the driver process as your program finishes.

Whst happens if you set the driver object to null/nothing (to break the link to the open browser) at the end of your method?

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[hunsnowboarder02]

Thank you for your reply.

Actually happens the same, window closes.

[David]

Peter's probably right about the garbage collection. From your code it looks like you create an instance of the driver right in the function/subroutine. So it's only in scope in there, so once the subroutine exits, the driver does not exist, which is same as equating to terminating the driver instance (and hence the browser window).

I'm not familiar with VBA, but is there somewhere else you can place the driver instance/instantiation in a global scope, and then this subroutine simply gets access to the driver instance as a global variable or from having the reference to the driver instance variable passed into the subroutine as an argument? For standard VB/VBScript, this is trivial to do. But for VBA with apps like Excel, Word, I'm not familiar with how you define global and app startup/teardown scopes for VBA code.

[hunsnowboarder02]

This makes sense absolutely. Will try it and give a feedback on it.

[Krishnan Mahadevan]

David/Peter

I dont seem to see this behavior with java. So kind of curious: is this garbage collection behavior specific to vba ?

Do you know if the vba implementation of selenium has some kind of destructors which gracefully quit the browser when the webdriver object goes out of memory ?

Thanks & regards
Krishnan Mahadevan

"All the desirable things in life are either illegal, expensive, fattening or in love with someone else!"

My Scribblings @ http://wakened-cognition.blogspot.com/
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[PeterJeffreyGale]

I use Java for WebDriver, but VBA for other work.

I've not seen this behaviour, in Java, but that's not to say we couldn't replicate it if we knew what caused it.

I don't see that there can be any fundamental differences in the implementation, which and I don't see that the VBA implementation of webdriver itself will handle any garbage collection, though in the absence of an explicit call to close the browser, this seemed a likely cause, as I recall that garbage collection can work differently in different languages. 

[PeterJeffreyGale]

Could be a question for the guys writing the VBA implementation itself, though I'd recommend the op switch to java for access to wider support and documention.