(Question)Video Upload Succeeds via Manual UI, but Fails Silently via Playwright's setInputFiles

[Sangamesh-m007]

Hi

I'm trying to automate a video upload in a DSP platform using Playwright. When I upload the video manually via the UI, everything works — the video preview is shown and I can proceed. But when I try to upload it using setInputFiles, the test passes but the video never appears, and it seems like the upload doesn't actually go through (even though there's no error).

[mxschmitt]

The problem is that you are uploading videos with proprietary codecs and Chromium does not support mp4 with all the codecs. In the code itself, there is something like this:

const a = document.createElement("video");
a.onloadedmetadata = () => {
  // ...
}

there is on onerror handler tho which would yell if the video can't load, e.g. due to unsupported codecs.

I recommend reaching out to your developers to add such a handler and add appropriate error reporting.

To fix the tests, you can use channel: 'chrome' in your playwright.config.ts's use section. I also used Codegen to create a bit of a more reliable version of your test which follow our best-practises:

import { test, expect } from '@playwright/test';

test('File Upload Test', async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto('https://qa.alkimi-dsp.com/user/login');
  await page.getByRole('textbox', { name: 'Login' }).fill('admin@alkimi.org');
  await page.getByRole('textbox', { name: 'Password' }).fill('AlkimiPassw0rd!');
  await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Log In' }).click();
  await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Creatives' }).click();
  await page.getByRole('menuitem', { name: 'Creatives' }).click();
  await page.getByRole('link', { name: 'New Creative' }).click();
  await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Select advertiser Select' }).click();
  await page.getByText('Advertiser-').click();
  await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Creative details' }).click();
  await page.getByRole('textbox', { name: 'name' }).fill('Tester123');
  await page.locator('[id="Date\\ From"]').fill('2025-05-22');
  await page.getByRole('group').filter({ hasText: 'Date To*' }).getByRole('textbox').fill('2025-05-23');
  await page.getByRole('textbox', { name: 'landingUrl' }).fill('https://www.alkimi.org');
  await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Dimensions Dimensions *' }).click();
  await page.getByText('1280x720').click();
  await page.getByText('Select a file or drop hereMP4, WEBM or OGG, file size no more than 10MBSelect').click();
  const waitForFileChooser = page.waitForEvent('filechooser');
  await page.getByText('Select File').click();
  const fileChooser = await waitForFileChooser;
  await fileChooser.setFiles('output.mp4');
  await expect(page.getByText('1280px x 720px')).toBeVisible();
});