Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations gkittelson on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

How do I establish an open connection to an open web browser in C#?

xarzu

IS-IT--Management
Jan 16, 2012
20
US
How do I establish an open connection to an open web browser in C#?

In a Microsoft C# program using a Visual Studio Code I am using the following namespaces:

> using OpenQA.Selenium;
> using OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome;
> using OpenQA.Selenium.Support.UI;

After I get a string variable, "url", assigned with a URL of a website page, I use the following commands which successfully opens a browser window and loads the web site:

> IWebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
> driver.Navigate().GoToUrl(url);

But this opens a chrome browser which is denoted somewhere as being a "test" session. It somehow knows it was launched from a program. And, since I am using this program to automate some interactions with linkedin, this information is passed along to linkedin which prompts me that it requires I login. This creates a cascading seriies of events that are difficult to automate including using my cell as a means of verification.

Here, let me show you what I am up against. This screen shot:
01.png

https://www.likablelogic.org/images/Direct/01.png
shows that the web browser that my code launches through selenium commands has a label on it, "Chrome is bring controlled by automated test software". Yes, and I wrote this automated test software.

What is most annoying is the fact that there is no log in to the session which is done automatically when I normally launch a browser. Here see this screen shot
02.png

https://www.likablelogic.org/images/Direct/02.png
where you can see that the user icon is this nondescript non-person.
I made a video to demonstrate how pointless and frusturating this is:


Youtube Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mgq7UHORmU

So, instead of taking this route, how do I establish an open connection to an open web browser in C#? I figure, if I instead connect to a web browser that is already open and already has its veriication steps done with linkedin, then I won't be prompted to log in and do any user verification.

On a personal note, if this is intentional security measures to prevent people from abusing a system, then this is a sad thing.

On a broader view, will all this mean I will have to make a web browser from scratch?

I do not think so. Here is the bottom line. I am using selenium commands. Selenium is used for software testing. So there must be some way to attack a C# program to an actively open chrome web browser and interact with it. How do I do that?


Is it better to use a different browser other than Chrome? How would I do that in C# code?
 

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top