How to perform selenium download?

169 Asked by AlisonKelly in QA Testing , Asked on May 10, 2022

Basically I want to at least check that a download-able file exists / download link works and preferably get stuff like the file size too.

Here's an example:

link = self.browser.find_element_by_link_text('link text')
href = link.get_attribute('href')
download = self.browser.get(href)
print download
That fourth line prints "None", presumably because I haven't manually clicked the Save button, and even if I had, I doubt WebDriver would be able to "see" the file.

Any ideas? I'm using Firefox as my browser-under-test, and I understand that the file handling for downloads is somewhat browser and/or OS-specific.

Answered by Al German

Here's a solution for selenium download. Set Firefox's preferences to save automatically, and not have the downloads window popup. Then you just grab the file, and it'll download.

So, something like this:

FirefoxProfile Profile = new FirefoxProfile();

fxProfile.setPreference("browser.download.folderList",2);

fxProfile.setPreference("browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting",false);

fxProfile.setPreference("browser.download.dir","c:\mydownloads");

fxProfile.setPreference("browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk","text/csv");

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(fxProfile);

driver.navigate().to("http://www.foo.com/bah.csv");

and given you now have the download directory, never ask to save, and no download manager appearing, automation from this point should be straightforward.

How to perform selenium download?

Your Answer