Automated Testing PDF in Selenium WebDriver

How to test downloading PDFs in Selenium WebDriver

Many websites feature links that download a PDF rather than just opening one. These PDF files’ content might be static (e.g. a restaurant menu or a booklet), or dynamically generated (e.g. a bank statement or a student’s grade report).

This tutorial will show you how to allow PDF downloads and verify the PDF contents in an automated test.

Test Design

1. Navigate to a web page and download the PDF
   For my example, I’m downloading a book sample PDF at http://zhimin.com/books/pwta. When you download it, you need to configure where the file is downloading to on your machine.
2. Verify the downloaded PDF exists
   Once the file is downloaded from the browser, check if its downloaded successfully on your machine.
3. Read and verify the PDF’s contents
   This step is not only for dynamically generated PDFs. It’s good practice to verify your PDF’s contents, even if it’s a static PDF.

Saving the download file to a specific location

First, let’s make sure we save the PDF to an area safe for testing. To test safely and avoid conflicts, download your PDF file to a test folder, and delete the PDF file after the test executes.

PDF verification library

Then use the ‘pdf-reader’ gem to verify the PDF. Install it on your command line with:

gem install pdf-reader

Open browser with specified download folder

To set a download location in Selenium WebDriver, you must update your browser options.

before(:all) do
    # set up download settings
    @download_path = "/Users/courtney/tmp"
    options = Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Options.new
    options.add_preference("download.prompt_for_download", false)
    options.add_preference("download.default_directory", @download_path)
    
    @driver = $driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for(:chrome, :options => options)
    driver.get(site_url)
end

Setting prompt_for_download to false means that you won’t receive a pop-up asking…