WebElementFacadeImpl.clear method does not work properly

[martinsefcik]

There were some changes made recently in clear method in #1788, but I guess it still does not work as expected, because when the test is running locally e.g. under Mac but against Selenium Grid hub or against Browserstack and target OS is different e.g. Windows then incorrect shortcut is used for selecting all text and the result of clear method is that key 'a' is entered into text field.

So I guess this clear method should not check local OS type but target OS type to distinguish which shortcut combination should be used.

Tested using version 2.2.1

[wakaleo]

Could you propose a PR?

[martinsefcik]

@wakaleo I can try, but I'm not sure I will be able to do it. I will need some hint at least how to start.
Is the some possibility how to get remote OS type e.g from driver ?

[wakaleo]

Yeah, knowing the remote OS in a general case would be very tricky. Maybe find another general way to clear a text field? I suspect the current approach was done because the intuitive approach (eg use clear()m) doesn’t work.

[martinsefcik]

proposal 1:
Ugly but general solution would be to press backspace many times based text length ... not usable for textareas with large texts - can be very slow.

proposal 2:
Another ugly solution would be to always (on all OSes) use both combinations in following order:

1. CMD+a and DELETE
2. CTRL+a and DELETE
   must be in this order because CTRL+a does nothing (only moves cursor at the beginning of textarea) on Mac but CMD+a prints a on Windows

It would be better to find some nicer solution, but if it is not possible to get easily target OS type then I don't know how to do it.

[wakaleo]

Knowing the target OS will depend on the remote server being used, so does not seem possible in a general case. I think ugly solution #2 would be the least worse.

[arustamov]

Hi @wakaleo,

Noticed today serenity clear method implementation stopped working for me and my colleagues in Chrome 97+
It produces some special characters entered instead of getting the input element value blank
Compared to the selenoid instance where I have chrome version 92 defined. Works fine there. Works fine in firefox as well

Had to switch to the following to resolve the issue:
getJavascriptExecutorFacade().executeScript("arguments[0].value = '';", element);

Wonder if you or anyone else experienced the same?

[wakaleo]

I noticed this today too - I'll push a fix in the next release.

[wakaleo]

Fixed in 3.2.0

[HajekOndrej]

Hi @wakaleo, sorry to hijack this, but I think it may be related... in commit you have removed the element content clearing workaround in WebElementFacadeImpl (lines 1274-1276) stating that it's no longer needed. I have recently run into issue with this, that the .clear() method doesn't really work without this, so I had to add the workaround to my code. Is that expected?

[wakaleo]

Hi @wakaleo, sorry to hijack this, but I think it may be related... in commit you have removed the element content clearing workaround in WebElementFacadeImpl (lines 1274-1276) stating that it's no longer needed. I have recently run into issue with this, that the .clear() method doesn't really work without this, so I had to add the workaround to my code. Is that expected?

Dunno, I don't do mobile. Feel free to put it back with a PR if it is needed.

[HajekOndrej]

Hi @wakaleo, sorry to hijack this, but I think it may be related... in commit you have removed the element content clearing workaround in WebElementFacadeImpl (lines 1274-1276) stating that it's no longer needed. I have recently run into issue with this, that the .clear() method doesn't really work without this, so I had to add the workaround to my code. Is that expected?

Dunno, I don't do mobile. Feel free to put it back with a PR if it is needed.

Thanks for your quick reply.
Correct me if I am wrong, but the workaround was there for NOT mobile. The problem manifests in Chrome.