How to handle Windows Download dialog box using selenium web driver - selenium-webdriver

Question

I am using selenium web driver (Not selenium RC). I need to download a xml file by clicking a link. I have did some Google search, and I have found in some answers an using AutoIT in order to handle OS related dialog boxes.
But is there any other option using selenium to handle this without using AutoIT tool.
Kindly suggest some ideas.

Answer 1

Can you be a bit more specific which browser you are using. If it's firefox you can have a greater control on the file download. Any other browser including firefox you can use robot class. This can be used to perform the click on ok button for downloads. If its chorme then file download happens automatically without any intervention.

Answer 2

For the newest version of Firefox (as of writing), these are the arguments that I needed to avoid the download box. Note that you need to specify a directory that you can write to as seen in the third statement:
FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();
profile.setPreference( "browser.download.folderList", 2 );
profile.setPreference( "browser.download.dir", <YOUR DOWNLOAD PATH> );
profile.setPreference( "plugin.disable_full_page_plugin_for_types", "application/pdf" );
profile.setPreference(
"browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk",
"application/csv,text/csv,application/pdfss, application/excel" );
profile.setPreference( "browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting", false );
profile.setPreference( "pdfjs.disabled", true );
Note that the last line with pdfjs is required for the newer versions of Firefox, where it wasn't before. More info Here

Answer 3

I face Authentication Proxy pop-up issue in my project. So I tried below solution and it is working fine.
When we run Script from Selenium Web driver on Security Environment following Setup needs to be done to handle Authentication Proxy.
First you need to know below details,
network.proxy.autoconfig_url (Example: "http://example.com/abc.pac")
network.proxy.http (Example: abc-proxy.com)
network.proxy.http_port (Example: 8080)
private static WebDriver initFirefoxDriver(String appURL)
{
System.out.println("Launching Firefox browser..");
FirefoxProfile firefoxProfile = new FirefoxProfile();
firefoxProfile.setPreference("network.proxy.type", 1);
firefoxProfile.setPreference("network.proxy.autoconfig_url", "http://example.com/abc.pac");
firefoxProfile.setPreference("network.proxy.http", " abc-proxy.com");
firefoxProfile.setPreference("network.proxy.http_port", 8080);
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(firefoxProfile);
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
driver.manage().window().maximize();
driver.navigate().to(appURL);
//driver.get(appURL);
return driver;
}