Chrome Connection

Overview

ChromeDriver uses several classes to connect to Chrome and control it.

• Chrome class represents the Chrome browser controlled by ChromeDriver.
• DevToolsClient class represents a connection to Chrome.
• WebView class wraps around a DevToolsClient to provide some higher level methods.

Chrome class

ChromeDriver uses abstract class Chrome to represent the Chrome browser that it controls. Other classes derived from it provide the actual implementations. Here is its inheritance hierarchy:

• Chrome: Abstract base class, defining the API.
  • ChromeImpl: Still an abstract class, it contains implementation code that is shared by concrete classes.
    • ChromeDesktopImpl: Represents a local desktop Chrome browser.
    • ChromeAndroidImpl: Represents an adb connection to a Chrome running on an Android device.
    • ChromeRemoteImpl: Represents a Chrome browser that is started independently from ChromeDriver, and is connected through a TCP port. The browser can be running locally or remotely.
  • StubChrome: An implementation with all methods stubbed out, used for unit tests only.
    • Various test classes.

There is a separate instance of ChromeImpl for each ChromeDriver session. It has several fields related to the connection between ChromeDriver and the browser:

• ChromeImpl::devtools_http_client_ is a DevToolsHttpClient object. It contains the URL necessary to connect to browser DevTools (e.g., http://localhost:12345), but doesn't contain any actual connections.

• ChromeImpl::devtools_websocket_client_ is a DevToolsClient object. It encapsulates a browser-wide DevTools connection, used for sending commands that apply to the whole browser. This instance of DevToolsClient is sometimes referred to as the "browser-wide DevToolsClient".

• ChromeImpl::web_views_ is a list of WebView objects, one for each tab active in the browser. These objects are used for sending commands that apply to a specific tab. Chrome::GetWebViewById allows retrieving a WebView (tab or page) by its ID. (There are additional WebView instances that represent frames, but ChromeImpl is not aware of them.)

DevToolsClient and WebView

Abstract class DevToolsClient and its implementation class DevToolsClientImpl handle communication between ChromeDriver and DevTools. DevToolsClient contains methods to connect to Chrome, send commands to Chrome, and receive responses and events from Chrome. Changes are rarely needed at this level to implement new features.

The abstract class WebView and its implementation class WebViewImpl contain higher-level methods on top of DevToolsClient. In addition to wrappers to methods provided by DevToolsClient, it also has higher level methods for synthetic event dispatching, cookie handling, etc. The rest of ChromeDriver usually interacts with Chrome through WebView class.

There are several types of DevToolsClient and WebView instances:

• Browser-wide DevToolsClient, with no matching WebView. It has id "browser".

• DevToolsClient and WebView representing a tab or window. Both should have the same id, a 32-digit uppercase hexadecimal number.

• DevToolsClient and WebView representing an OOPIF (out-of-process iframe, i.e., a frame connected to a different renderer process than its parent frame). They are created in response to Target.attachedToTarget event from DevTools. Each OOPIF has a targetId and a sessionId (not to be confused with ChromeDriver's session ID), both 32-bit hexadecimal numbers. The DevToolsClient uses the sessionId as its ID, and has a parent DevToolsClient. The WebView uses the targetId (same as frameId) as its ID, and has a parent WebView. No real connections are made. All communications are forwarded by the parent DevToolsClient and WebView.

Note that in most case, each instance of DevToolsClient is wrapped by a WebView. The browser-wide DevToolsClient is the only instance not wrapped.

From the point of view of the client application, each browser tab or window is represented by a window handle, the DevToolsClient, and WebView representing the tab/window. Each session has a tab that is currently active. The WebView connected to that tab can be retrieved with Session::GetTargetWindow.