The Selenium Webdriver cross-browser compatibility automates various web browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Microsoft Edge. In addition, it supports a vast pool of languages, including Java, C#, Python, and Ruby.

In this blog, we will briefly describe the HTTP status codes and take you through the necessary code snippet to check the response code using the Selenium Web driver. Read on.

HTTP Responses Classification

• Informational responses
• Successful responses
• Redirects
• Client errors
• Server errors

To identify various hyperlinks in a webpage, manual validation can be done though manual efforts will increase. It can take hours as manually each link needs to be opened in the browser which takes its own time.

However, if we use Selenium along with HTTPURLConnection class, the same can be done in a matter of a few minutes. This saves a lot of time as after opening the browser http connection checks response code without opening the same in browser and only by hitting the specified URL using http connection.

Prerequisite:

• Method (POST/PUT/GET/DELETE/etc.)
• URL (/oauth/token which will follow the URL for the instance of qTest you’re using)
• Headers
• Body

Benefits of using API testing with Selenium

• Leverage Open source tools
• Integrate in minutes
• Time-saving
• Cost-effectiveness

Below are the steps we need to follow for sending Java HTTP requests using HttpURLConnection class:

• Create a URL object from the GET/POST URL String.
• Call openConnection() method on URL object that returns instance of HttpURLConnection
• Set the request method in HTTPURLConnection instance, the default value is GET.
• Call setRequestProperty() method on HTTPURLConnection instance to set request header values, such as “User-Agent” and “Accept-Language” etc.
• We can call getResponseCode() to get the response HTTP code. This way we know if the request was processed successfully or there was an HTTP error message thrown.
• For GET, we can simply use Reader and InputStream to read the response and process it accordingly.
• For POST, before we read response we need to get the OutputStream from HTTPURLConnection instance and write POST parameters into it.

Use the below code to test the API Get Method using selenium:

import java.io.BufferedReader;

import java.io.IOException;

import java.io.InputStreamReader;

import java.net.HttpURLConnection;

import java.net.URL;

public class HttpResponseGetMethod {

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

String URL = "URL to test";

int code;

String Userid[] = new String[2];

HttpURLConnection.setFollowRedirects(false);

// Creating object of HTTPUrl connection for each url and opening connection

HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) new URL(URL).openConnection();

// Setting request method as Head/get

con.setRequestMethod("GET");

con.setRequestProperty("Accept-Charset", "UTF-8");

// Getting page Response code

code = con.getResponseCode();

System.out.println(code);

System.out.println(con.getInputStream());

BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(con.getInputStream()));

String line;

StringBuffer response = new StringBuffer();

for (int i = 0; i <= 10; i++) {

while ((line = in.readLine()) != null) {

response.append(line + "\n");

String x = response.toString();

System.out.println(response.toString());

Userid = x.split(",");

System.out.println(Userid[0] + " ------ " + Userid[1]);

}}

in.close();}}

Use the below code to test the API Post Method using selenium:

import java.io.BufferedReader;

import java.io.DataOutputStream;

import java.io.IOException;

import java.io.InputStreamReader;

import java.net.HttpURLConnection;

import java.net.MalformedURLException;

import java.net.URL;

public class HttpResponsePostMethod {

public static void main(String[] args) throws MalformedURLException, IOException {

String URL = "Url to test";

int code;

HttpURLConnection con = (HttpURLConnection) new URL(URL).openConnection();

con.setRequestMethod("POST");

con.setRequestProperty("User-Agent", "Mozilla/5.0");

con.setRequestProperty("Accept-Language", "en-US,en;q=0.5");

con.setRequestProperty("Content-Type", "application/json");

con.setRequestProperty("Accept-Charset", "UTF-8");

String body = "Body to pass";

con.setDoOutput(true);

DataOutputStream wr = new DataOutputStream(con.getOutputStream());

wr.writeBytes(body);

wr.flush();

wr.close();

code = con.getResponseCode();

System.out.println(code);

System.out.println(body);

System.out.println(con.getInputStream());

BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(con.getInputStream()));

String line;

StringBuffer response = new StringBuffer();

while ((line = in.readLine()) != null) {

response.append(line + "\n");

}

in.close();

System.out.println(response.toString());

}}

Summing Up

We have seen that the HTTPS status codes are responses to the HTTP requests to signal regarding the Webpage status. These are crucial in SEO to allow search engines to crawl conveniently and parse or index the URLs with their content. We have glimpsed the relevant code using Selenium to test the API Post and Get methods. It's paramount to test the Get method to ensure that the data received from the server is complete and accurate and that the API can handle the load with its existing potential—similarly, Post method testing ensures an easy sending of data without any erroneous information.