Coding for Workarounds So You Know When They Are Fixed

with most libraries you use to automate your work, you have to code workarounds.

i coded a workaround in my selenium webdriver tests because there was a bug in chromedriver which meant that cookies were created differently than other browsers.

when i upgraded to webdriver 2.53.0 and chromedriver 2.21 , i discovered i didn’t need my workaround anymore.

in the code, i had one set of code for chrome, and another set for other browsers:

// chromedriver has a bug where the domain is prefixed with '.' 
//therefore
// the app 'updates' a new cookie so when chromedriver
// returns the cookie it returns
// the first and not the updated one
if(driver.currentbrowser()== driver.browsername.googlechrome){
  acookie = getcookiewithlargestvaluenamed
               ("seleniumsimplifiedsearchnumvisits");
}else {
  acookie = driver.manage().getcookienamed(
                "seleniumsimplifiedsearchnumvisits");
}

the bug was 7499 and was fixed in the recent update to chromedriver.

how do i know it was fixed?

because i had failing @test methods.

tests in error:
  changecookievisitscountusingcookiebuilder
  (com.seleniumsimplified.webdriver.cookies.
   cookiesexercisestestworkwithextrasync): 
  chrome cookie creation issue has been resolved
  changecookievisitscount(
    com.seleniumsimplified.webdriver.cookies.
    cookiesexercisestestworkwithextrasync): 
  chrome cookie creation issue has been resolved

why did they fail (the workaround was still valid)?

because i had code that checked for that.

// this currently fails on chrome driver since
// chromedriver adds some extra cookies when it creates 
// a cookie with a domain
// https://code.google.com/p/selenium/issues/detail?id=7499
if(driver.currentbrowser() != driver.browsername.googlechrome){
  assertequals("we added the cookie correctly", cookiecount, 
               driver.manage().getcookies().size());
}else{
  if(driver.manage().getcookies().size()==cookiecount){
    throw new runtimeexception(
                 "chrome cookie creation issue has been resolved");
  }
// also chromedriver now adds a '.' in front of the domain
}

i added extra code to throw an error if the problem i was coding a workaround for went away.

i don’t know if that is a normal practice. but since i don’t really want workarounds in my code forever, and i likely won’t remember to check the release notes on every fix to see if i coded a workaround for a fix. this seems like a good workaround to check if workarounds are no longer good.

the code i was using to check for the largest value in a cookie, by the way, was:

private cookie getcookiewithlargestvaluenamed(string cookiename) {
    int largestcookieval=0;
    cookie largestcookie=null;
    for(cookie acookie : driver.manage().getcookies()){
        if(acookie.getname().contentequals(cookiename)){
            int cookieval = integer.parseint(acookie.getvalue());
            if(cookieval>largestcookieval) {
                largestcookieval = cookieval;
                largestcookie = acookie;
            }
        }
    }
    return largestcookie;
}