Desired Capabilities in Selenium WebDriver

Hello friends! in this post we will be studying about Desired Capabilities. Many times during automation, we may need to work on a particular session of browser or work with a browser having some specific configurable properties set or unset. Selenium web driver provides certain browser specific properties known as Desired Capabilities.

What are the Desired Capabilities?

Desired Capabilities are a set of properties used to configure a particular instance of the browser. We have both browser-independent capabilities like browserName, version, acceptSslCerts, etc as well as browser-specific capabilities like firefox_binary for Mozilla Firefox, chromeOptions for setting Chrome specific desired capabilities.

Setting Desired Capabilities in Selenium

The Desired Capabilities class provides a setCapabilityMethod() to set the different capabilities in a browser like accepting SSL certificates, enabling javascript, querying the browser location is allowed or not, etc.
Code snippet to set a capability to a browser instance –

//Specifying desired capabilities for Chrome browser
DesiredCapabilities acceptSSLCertificate = DesiredCapabilities.chrome();
//Setting capability to accept SSL certificates
acceptSSLCertificate.setCapability(CapabilityType.ACCEPT_SSL_CERTS, true);
//Binding the capabilities to a new instance of chrome browser
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(acceptSSLCertificate);

Capabilities

Some of the capabilities common to all browsers are –

• acceptSslCerts-
  Constant Field – CapabilityType.ACCEPT_SSL_CERTS
  For enabling or disabling a browser session to accept the SSL certificates by default.
  
  
• applicationCacheEnabled-
  Constant Field – CapabilityType.SUPPORTS_APPLICATION_CACHE
  For checking if the browser instance is capable of interacting with the application cache.
  
  
• cssSelectorsEnabled-
  Constant Field – CapabilityType.SUPPORTS_FINDING_BY_CSS
  For checking if the use of CSS selector for locating web elements is enabled or not.
  
  
• javascriptEnabled-
  Constant Field – CapabilityType.SUPPORTS_JAVASCRIPT
  For checking if javascript execution is enabled or not in the browser instance.
  
  
• takesScreenshot-
  Constant Field – CapabilityType.TAKES_SCREENSHOT
  For checking if the take screenshot ability is enabled or not.
  
  
• webStorageEnabled-
  Constant Field – CapabilityType.SUPPORTS_WEB_STORAGE
  For checking if the browser instance is capable of interacting with storage objects.
  
  
• handlesAlert-
  Constant Field – CapabilityType.SUPPORTS_ALERTS
  For checking if the browser instance is capable of handling window pop-ups.

That’s all we have in this section. Please comment below to share your views or ask any questions and don’t forget to check our complete selenium tutorial here.

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