Question

At my place of work we need to implement web browser automated testing.
Selenium web driver was chosen as the preferred option.
The company uses Internet Explorer for it’s client base and so the testing needs to be conducted using this browser.

Using:

Selenium 2.25.1, IEDriverServer 2.25.3, nUnit 2.6.1

I’ve created the most basic of tests which then run successfully on my personal laptop.

1. Create a C# class project. Add references to Selenium, IEDriverServer (location) and nUnit DLL’s.

2. Add in the test code and class/method decorations for nUnit.

3. Build, compile etc.

In nUnit, locate the newly compiled DLL project and run it.

Expected outcome is that the IEDriverServer will load and create an instance of Internet Explorer and navigate to the Google homepage.
Perform a search, check the results page title and parse the resulting links.

When I run the same test from my work machine (with McAfee installed), what actually happens is that each character that’s entered into the Google search box (using SendKeys) takes around 6-10 seconds to complete.
As a result, the IEDriverServer gives up and closes.
nUnit reports the test as a fail.

Digging around, I can see that the McAfee Access Protection Log has hundreds of entries stating
“Common Standard Protection:Prevent common programs from running files from the Temp folder”

I’m new to web automation but I’m convinced that this is the source of the problem, and have tried various hacks with the registry and environment variables without success.

Can’t seem to find much about this problem elsewhere and hope that one of you guys can suggest a workaround.

The company cannot relax the McAfee feature for obvious reasons.

Answer 1

The IEDriverServer.exe used by the IE driver requires use of a support library (DLL). Rather than forcing the user to have to remember to deploy this .DLL along with the executable, it’s stored as a resource inside the .exe file, and extracted at runtime. With version 2.25.3.5 of the IEDriverServer.exe (not released as a download but available as a prebuilt binary in the project Subversion repository), you can pass a command-line switch, -extract-path="C:\path\to\where\the\library\should\be\extracted". As long as the directory exists, and you have write permissions to the directory, the support library will be extracted to a randomly-named file in that directory.

The .NET bindings have been updated to contain code to take advantage of this new command-line switch as part of the InternetExplorerDriverService class. This functionality will be available as part of the next public release of the WebDriver .NET bindings.