Feature Request: Allow protractor to use promise as capabilities for multiCapabilities

[hankduan]

related:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27264146/setting-firefox-profile-in-a-setup-with-multiple-browsers
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26435438/creating-another-session-with-a-separate-firefox-profile-in-protractor
#1040
#1592

Right now, protractor can only accept promise as capabilities if we are NOT using multicapabilities. The reason for this is because multiCapabilities runs each task in a new process, so the promise (function) cannot be passed (single capabilities work because we're not forking). Alternatively we could resolve capabilities in the launcher, before passing the resolved capabilities into the new processes; however, this will break #1040, which relies on capability promises to be resolved after driverProvider setup (i.e. for proxy purposes).

I can't think of an easy way of doing this (without large refactoring), but it is definitely doable. Just creating this issue to get a feel of how many people would benefit from being able to use promises in multiCapabilities and/or collect ideas.

[alecxe]

I would definitely benefit from this. Right now, I have to handle 2 different protractor configs and run protractor twice (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27264146/setting-firefox-profile-in-a-setup-with-multiple-browsers).

@hankduan thanks for creating the feature request.

[hankduan]

fyi, this is how to do it if we don't have the constraint from #1040:
#1592

[hankduan]

#1629 achieves this. You can pass in a function to config.getMultiCapabilities like onPrepare and onCleanup. This function can return a promise to multiCapabilties (i.e. array of capabilities).

See https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/master/spec/getCapabilitiesConf.js for an example.