9

I know there's a

driver.navigate().back()

but that's not what I'm looking for.

Let's say a user is on PageA, they click on a submit button which takes them to a submit page. On that page, there are two buttons: change selection and confirm. Confirm takes them to the next page, but change selection takes them back to the page they were on.

It's not always going to be PageA, a user can be on PageB, PageC, etc. So, I was wondering if there is a way to return the PageFactory of whatever page the user was previously on? I haven't been able to find anything so far

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    Why do you want that rather than finding the appropriate button? If you use the "Change Selection" button, you'll get all the appropriate state information held in the site, where a different method may not maintain the information and cause unexpected results.
    – Kate Paulk ♦
    May 29, 2014 at 16:47

2 Answers 2

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4

I had a similar issue; I wanted a base class for my PageObjects that abstracted the navigation between pages in the wizard flow. What I ended up doing was, after clicking any link that would navigate to a new page, I grabbed the current URL and constructed a new page instance based on that to return. Something like:

protected PageObject navigate(WebElement button) {
    button.click();
    PageObject nextPage = getPageFromURL(driver.getCurrentUrl());
    PageFactory.initElements(driver, nextPage);
    return nextPage;
}

where getPageFromURL has a big lookup table of URLs to PageObject classes. Then I could implement meaningful methods like:

public PageObject clickNext() {
    return navigate(nextButton);
}

or:

 public PageObject viewProductDetails(Product p) {
    return navigate(getDetailsButton(p));
}

I hope that helps you with architecting a solution!

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7

You can use JavaScript to go back one step in the history of the browser, this should bring you back on the previous page.

driver.executeScript("window.history.go(-1)");

See using JavaScript with Selenium and JavaScript History functions links.

Also see this thread about issue and difference with navigate.back()

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    This answer should actually be using an instance of JavascriptExecutor before the executeScript call. Such as: JavascriptExecutor js = (JavascriptExecutor) driver; Then use js.executeScript("window.history.go(-1)");
    – urbanaut
    Jun 1, 2016 at 15:27

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