Geb : How to interact with browser's BasicAuth dialog while page is loading

Question

I have an application hosted on tomcat which is protected & proxied by apache's Digest authentication.I get a basicAuth style login dialog when I access any thing on the server.

when I try to login using below code it never comes to the "driver.switchTo().alert()" part.... it keeps looping for ever in the via ... statement and throws exception. I am guessing that both "to" and "via" statements of GEB wait for page load to complete. now geb is waiting for page load and page is waiting for geb to enter credentials. a dead lock. can you please provide any suggestions on how to resolve this ? please note that I did already try http://:@mydomain.com/index.jsp but it keeps prompting me with a menacing login dialog.

via AppLoginPage //using a page object here 
Alert alert= driver.switchTo().alert();
// Type the username
alert.sendKeys(user);        
Robot robot = new Robot();
robot.keyPress(KeyEvent.VK_TAB);

in simple words, how to make geb complete with out waiting for full page load so that my robot code can handle the alert? hope that was clear.

Answer 1

I don't think that it is possible to handle basic authentication dialogs using WebDriver and thus Geb as well. You can try to provide credentials in base url, e.g. baseUrl = 'http://admin:[email protected]'. If that doesn't work then you will need to setup some kind of an authenticating proxy and configure the driver you're using to use it.

Answer 2

We use baseUrl = 'http://admin:[email protected]' style of authenticating for our internal app.

We did at one stage use a proxy and also tried Robot but it had sometimes caused issues with existing libraries used by Webdriver and found this more to be less problematic.

If you are using IE :@ will not work. You can however turn on this feature using Group policy and reg-edit. Please be aware this is a security issue.

If this is not your preferred way I can dig out the old code for you.

I used a similar answer as per this question

Answer 3

I couldn't use user:password solution, because my name contains @ (or is there way to escape it?). In any case, I experimented with LittleProxy, because it is in Java and I hoped I can start it easily before the test itself and then "inject" Authorization header into my request sent to the tested URL.

So: 1. Start the proxy, 2. Configure the driver so it uses proxy properly, 3. Run the test

This resulted in rough code that can be found in its completeness in my answer to similar question How to handle server authentication using Geb/WebDriver

Code is based on Browse.drive call, and it sets up Firefox driver. I hope IE can be used this way too.

I didn't know where to put the answer, really, but I don't want to duplicate it - and it is on StackOverflow after all.