Selenium 4 – Chrome Dev Protocol – Block Url

Selenium 4 alpha version has introduced support for Chrome Dev Protocol which is really a good news for automation testers. This can be used in various scenarios. E.g.

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• Mimic Geo location
• Block a url (this is particularly useful if you want to check how page behaves if e.g. product recommendation api is blocked)
• Check if the application recovers from brief network issue etc

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In this blog we will see, how to block a url with the ChromeDevTools. And we will use setBlockedUrls method to achieve this.

Sample code

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package selenium4.selenium4;

import static java.util.Optional.empty;
import static java.util.Optional.of;

import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.devtools.DevTools;
import org.openqa.selenium.devtools.network.Network;
import org.testng.annotations.AfterTest;
import org.testng.annotations.BeforeTest;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;

import com.google.common.collect.ImmutableList;

public class Selenium4Locators {
	ChromeDriver webDriver = null;
	String url=""; // Application url under Test
	String urlToBlock=""; // Url which you want to block. It can be an API url or image url etc
	@BeforeTest
	public void beforeTest() throws InterruptedException{
		
		  System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver","C:\\Selenium\\Chrome84\\chromedriver.exe");
		  webDriver = new ChromeDriver();
		  webDriver.manage().window().maximize();
		  Thread.sleep(2000);
		  
	}
  @Test
  public void f() {
	  DevTools devTools = webDriver.getDevTools();
	  devTools.createSession();
	  devTools.send(Network.enable(of(100000000), empty(),empty()));
 
      devTools.send(Network.setBlockedURLs(ImmutableList.of(urlToBlock)));
	  
	  webDriver.get(url); // load application url under Test
  }
  
  @AfterTest
	public void afterTest() {
	  webDriver.quit();
  }
}

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Few points to note:

Here we are using ChromeDriver as its ChromeDevProtocol 🙂

Replace the url and urlToBlock as per your requirement. And also use Thread.sleep() or Debug to see if the urlToBlock is really blocked or not.