Switching Between Different Windows

A lot of times we are faced with situations, where clicking a link or a button opens up an entire new browser window, and we have multiple instances of windows opening up.

Let’s see a quick example here :

Browse over to this link, and click the hyperlink that says “Open a popup Window“.  A little browser window opens up when we click this hyperlink.

These are multiple windows, and most often than not, they are present in a majority of webpages. If we want to perform some functions in the child window (the one which comes after we click the link), then we need to switch over the control to the child windows and then perform that said operation, because by default,  the focus is on the parent window.

Selenium API has provided us in-built methods, so that we can reset or transfer the focus from the parent to child windows and then perform what we wanna do.

Let us see how these situations can be handled using Selenium.

import unittest
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

class GoogleOrgSearch(unittest.TestCase):

       def setUp(self):
           self.driver = webdriver.Firefox()

       def test_google_search_page(self):
           driver = self.driver
           driver.get("http://www.quackit.com/html/codes/html_popup_window_code.cfm")
           str1=driver.title
           print(str1)

           #get the window handles using window_handles( ) method
           window_before = driver.window_handles[0]
           print(window_before)

#since the pop-up is now in an iframe
driver.switch_to.frame(driver.find_element_by_name('result1'))
           driver.find_element_by_link_text('Open a popup window').click()

           #get the window handle after a new window has opened
           window_after = driver.window_handles[1]

           #switch on to new child window
           driver.switch_to.window(window_after)
           str2=driver.title
           print(str2)
           print(window_after)

           #assert that main window and child window title don't match
           self.assertNotEqual(str1,str2)
           print('This window has a different title')

           #switch back to original window
           driver.switch_to.window(window_before)

           #assert that the title now match
           self.assertEqual(str1,driver.title)
           print('Returned to parent window. Title now match')
      def tearDown(self):
           self.driver.close()

if __name__ == "__main__":
unittest.main()

The output should be, the windows name should be printed and title should be asserted as well. Once you run the script, we have this output in PyCharm :

Now let us understand how we managed to do it .  The window_handles( ) method provides a way to return all windows in a current session.

We used the switch_to.window( ) method to switch over the control to newly opened window. Here we can pass the following two parameters- either the windows name or

Now here we have assumed that we already know that we have two windows open. What if, there are more than two child windows open. How would you switch the control over to the third or more open windows? I have discussed this more in detail here.