Question

I learned how to use Firefox 4 with watir and webdriver (on Win7 x64), setting profile items. Example:

profile = Selenium::WebDriver::Firefox::Profile.new
profile["browser.download.useDownloadDir"] = true
profile["browser.download.dir"] = 'D:\\FirefoxDownloads'
profile["browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk"] = "application/csv"
driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :firefox, :profile => profile
browser = Watir::Browser.new(driver)

What I try to do with the example below, is setting CSV files to be always downloaded to a specific directory, never opened.
The code above succeeds in setting all the files automatically downloaded to the specified directory, but setting browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk has no effect: I still get the open/save question.
After the script runs, the Firefox window is still open, and I enter the URL about:config.
I can see that browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk was correctly set to application.csv , but in firefox/options/options/applications I don’t see the entry for CSV files.
It seems that the menu setting, that is really effective, is not really bound with the about:config setting.
What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

I’ve done some testing of this for you, unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a standard content-type for CSV files. You can try passing a comma separated list of content-types, hopefully one of those work for you. For me it was application/octet-stream that did the trick…

require 'watir-webdriver'
require 'selenium-webdriver'

profile = Selenium::WebDriver::Firefox::Profile.new
profile["browser.download.useDownloadDir"] = true
profile["browser.download.dir"] = '/tmp'
profile["browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk"] = "text/plain, application/vnd.ms-excel, text/csv, text/comma-separated-values, application/octet-stream"
driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :firefox, :profile => profile
browser = Watir::Browser.new(driver)

browser.goto "http://altentee.com/test/test.csv"