How To Test PDF Files Using Selenium Automation?

How To Handle PDF In Selenium Webdriver?

To handle a PDF document in Selenium test automation, we can use a java library called PDFBox. Apache PDFBox is an open-source library that exclusively helps in handling the PDF documents. We can use it to verify the text present in the document, extract a specific section of text or image in the documents, and so on. To use this in Selenium testing PDF files, we need to either add the maven dependency in the pom.xml file or add it as an external jar.

To add as a maven dependency:

• Navigate to the below URL

  https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.pdfbox

• Select the latest version and place in the pom.xml file. The maven dependency would look like below

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.pdfbox</groupId>
    <artifactId>pdfbox</artifactId>
    <version>2.0.20</version>
</dependency>

To add as an external jar:

• Download the jar file in the below path

  https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/pdfbox/pdfbox/2.0.20/

• Go to your project and select configure Build Path and add the external jar file as below.

  

• Once you have added the dependency or jar in your project you are good to go with the coding part.

Verify The Content In The PDF

Next in this tutorial about Selenium testing PDF files, we find out how to verify the PDF’s content. To check if a specific text piece is present in a PDF document we use PDFTextStripper which can be imported from org.apache.pdfbox.util.PDFTextStripper.

This is the code we can use for PDF testing using Selenium and verify its content.

package Automation;

import java.io.BufferedInputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;

import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
import org.apache.pdfbox.text.PDFTextStripper;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.annotations.AfterTest;
import org.testng.annotations.BeforeTest;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;

public class PdfHandling {
	
	WebDriver driver = null;
	
	@BeforeTest
	public void setUp() {
		//specify the location of the driver
		System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\Users\Shalini\Downloads\Driver\chromedriver.exe");
		
		//instantiate the driver
		driver = new ChromeDriver();
	}
	
	@Test
	public void verifyContentInPDf() {
		//specify the url of the pdf file
		String url ="http://www.pdf995.com/samples/pdf.pdf";
		driver.get(url);
		try {
			String pdfContent = readPdfContent(url);
			Assert.assertTrue(pdfContent.contains("The Pdf995 Suite offers the following features"));
		} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
	}
	
	@AfterTest
	public void tearDown() {
		driver.quit();
	}
	
	
	public static  String readPdfContent(String url) throws IOException {
		
		URL pdfUrl = new URL(url);
		InputStream in = pdfUrl.openStream();
		BufferedInputStream bf = new BufferedInputStream(in);
		PDDocument doc = PDDocument.load(bf);
		int numberOfPages = getPageCount(doc);
		System.out.println("The total number of pages "+numberOfPages);
		String content = new PDFTextStripper().getText(doc);
		doc.close();
	
	return content;
}
	
	public static int getPageCount(PDDocument doc) {
		//get the total number of pages in the pdf document
		int pageCount = doc.getNumberOfPages();
		return pageCount;
		
	}

}

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE suite SYSTEM "http://testng.org/testng-1.0.dtd">
<suite name="PDF Handling">
  <test name="Verify Pdf content">
      <classes>
      <class name="Automation.PdfHandling"/>
      </classes>
  </test> 
 </suite>

To run the test, click on the class -> Run As -> TestNG Test.

The output console would be showing the default test report indicating the success and failure cases.

TestNG console

Do you know how to upload and download a file in Selenium? Watch this video to learn how to upload and download files in Selenium WebDriver using different techniques.

Download PDF file

Sometimes before starting off with Selenium testing PDF files, we need to download them. To download the PDF file from a webpage, we need to specify the Selenium locator to identify the link to download. We also need to disable the popup window which asks us to specify the path in which the downloaded file has to be placed.

This is the code that can be used for downloading PDFs before we start Selenium testing PDF files.

package Automation;

import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeOptions;
import org.testng.annotations.AfterTest;
import org.testng.annotations.BeforeTest;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;

public class DownloadPdf {
	
	WebDriver driver = null;
	@BeforeTest
	public void setUp() {
		System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\Users\Shalini\Downloads\Driver\chromedriver.exe");
		
		ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
		Map<String, Object> prefs = new HashMap<String, Object>();
		prefs.put("download.prompt_for_download", false);
		options.setExperimentalOption("prefs", prefs);
		driver = new ChromeDriver(options);
	}
	
	
	@Test
	public void downloadPdf() {
	driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
	driver.manage().window().maximize();
	driver.get("https://www.learningcontainer.com/sample-pdf-files-for-testing");
	
	//locator to click the pdf download link
	driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[@id="bfd-single-download-810"]/div/div[2]/a/p[1]/strong")).click();
	}
	
	@AfterTest
	public void tearDown() {
		driver.quit();

	}

}

Console output

TestNG output console

Set The Start Of The PDF Document

Verifying a small PDF file would be an easy task with Selenium testing PDF files. But what will you do for larger sized files? The solution is simple. You can set the starting page of the PDF and proceed with your validation of PDF testing using Selenium.

If you look at the sample PDF link that I have mentioned in this article, it contains 5 pages and the introduction starts on page 2. If the startpage is set as 2 in the code and the text is printed, you may see the content which has been printed from the second page. As said earlier, if the file size is large, you may set the start of the document, extract the content, and just validate the content.

Below is the simple code to set the start of the document for Selenium testing PDF files.

package Automation;

import java.io.BufferedInputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;

import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
import org.apache.pdfbox.text.PDFTextStripper;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.annotations.AfterTest;
import org.testng.annotations.BeforeTest;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;

public class ExtractContent {
	
	WebDriver driver = null;
	
	@BeforeTest
	public void setUp() {
		//specify the location of the driver
		System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\Users\Shalini\Downloads\Driver\chromedriver.exe");
		
		//instantiate the driver
		driver = new ChromeDriver();
	}
	
	@Test
	public void verifyContentInPDf() {
		//specify the url of the pdf file
		String url ="http://www.pdf995.com/samples/pdf.pdf";
		driver.get(url);
		try {
			String pdfContent = readPdfContent(url);
			System.out.println(pdfContent);
			Assert.assertTrue(pdfContent.contains("Introduction"));
		} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
	}
	
	@AfterTest
	public void tearDown() {
		driver.quit();
	}
	
	
	public static  String readPdfContent(String url) throws IOException {
		
		URL pdfUrl = new URL(url);
		InputStream in = pdfUrl.openStream();
		BufferedInputStream bf = new BufferedInputStream(in);
		PDDocument doc = PDDocument.load(bf);
		PDFTextStripper pdfStrip = new PDFTextStripper();
		pdfStrip.setStartPage(2);
		String content = pdfStrip.getText(doc);
		doc.close();
	
	return content;
}
	
	public static int getPageCount(PDDocument doc) {
		//get the total number of pages in the pdf document
		int pageCount = doc.getNumberOfPages();
		return pageCount;
		
	}

}

Console output

The console shows the content starting from the second page.

As we have discussed earlier in this tutorial for Selenium testing PDF files- When the file size is large, you can set the start page of the document and extract the content and proceed with your validation.

But what if you have to print the entire content of a specific page?

If we set only the start page and print the content, then all the contents starting from the specified page will be printed till the end of the document. In case if the file size is large that’s not a good option. Instead, we can set the end page of the document too!

Wouldn’t that make Selenium testing PDF files easier?

If we wish to print the contents starting from page 2 to page 3 we can set the below option in our code.

pdfStrip.setStartPage(2);
pdfStrip.setEndPage(3);

If we want to print the entire content of a single page, we can mention the same page number as the start as well as the end page.

pdfStrip.setStartPage(2);
pdfStrip.setEndPage(2);

In the next section of this Selenium testing PDF files tutorial, we will take a look at PDF testing using Selenium Grid on a cloud-based platform.