Selenium Core Bug and TinyMCE Anchor Tags

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 22:01:18 -0700
selenium, rails, functional, testing, tinymce

Today, I was trying to get Selenium to click an anchor tag that was created with the "link" plugin in a TinyMCE editor. I was able to verify that the link was present with something as simple as verifyElementPresent('link=Link Text'). However, when I tried calling clickAndWait('link=Link Text'), it gave a "Window does not exist" error. A quick Google search yielded the answer: a bug in Selenium Core.

When the TinyMCE "link" plugin creates a link that doesn't open in a new window, it sets the "target" attribute on the anchor tag to "_self". Selenium Core versions prior to 0.8.4 (which hasn't been released yet) don't respond to links with "target" set to "_self".

If you're doing Rails development and using the selenium_on_rails plugin, it uses an old version of Selenium Core (0.7.something) as of this posting. To fix the anchor tag problem, I replaced the contents of the selenium-core directory under vendor/plugins/selenium_on_rails with that of the core directory of the Selenium Core 0.8.3 release, then applied the patch described in the bug spec linked to above. This seems to have fixed the problem.

Hopefully this saves you all some time and muddling.