Question

I’m using Selenium 2.28 & IE8 on WinXP32. I need to be able to send the following keyboard command to my webpage: ALT + k

The following works perfectly in Chrome & Firefox17:

- Chrome:
Actions builder = new Actions(driver);
builder.sendKeys(Keys.ALT, "k").build().perform();

- Firefox 17 (requires extra command key for same effect):
Actions builder = new Actions(driver);
builder.sendKeys(Keys.SHIFT, Keys.ALT, "k").build().perform();

I’ve tried all of the following in IE without success :

- builder.sendKeys(Keys.ALT, "k").build().perform();
- builder.sendKeys(Keys.ALT, Keys.SHIFT, "k").build().perform();
- builder.sendKeys(Keys.chord(Keys.ALT, "k")).build().perform();
- builder.sendKeys(Keys.chord(Keys.SHIFT, Keys.ALT, "k")).build().perform();
- builder.keyDown(Keys.ALT).sendKeys("k").build().perform();
- builder.keyDown(Keys.ALT).sendKeys("k").keyUp(Keys.ALT).build().perform();
- builder.keyDown(Keys.SHIFT).keyDown(Keys.ALT).sendKeys("k").build().perform();
- builder.keyDown(Keys.SHIFT).keyDown(Keys.ALT).sendKeys("k").keyUp(Keys.ALT).keyUp(Keys.SHIFT).build().perform();

Any suggestion on how to achieve what I want?

Answer 1

I’ve had to resort to using a Robot to do it for Internet Explorer:

import java.awt.Robot
...
Robot robot;
try { 
  robot = new Robot();          
  robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_ALT);
  robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_K);
  robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_K);
  robot.keyRelease(KeyEvent.VK_ALT);
}catch (AWTException e) {
  e.printStackTrace();
}

I would prefer to do it just using Selenium APIs, but this workaround will suffice until that is possible.