How do you call an external API from Selenium script to populate a field using Node JS? - node.js

Question

I have a use case where I need to call an external API, parse the JSON that is returned and populate a form field in a web page all within a Selenium script written using Node JS.
Something like this:
// in Selenium script get the form field
let inputElement = await getElementById(driver, "my-id");
// then call an API including callback function
// in the callback function with the JSON response from the API
const myText = response.data.text;
await inputElement.sendKeys(myText,Key.ENTER);
I actually not even sure where to start with this - because I would be adding asynchronous code (the API call and waiting for the response in the callback) to the existing asynchronous code that is running as part of the Selenium script. And I need to not lose references to the web driver and the input element.
Some advice and recommendations to get me going would be very helpful.

Answer 1

If you are using node's inbuild https module the you can do something like this..
const { Builder, By, Key, until } = require("selenium-webdriver");
const https = require("https");
(async function example() {
let driver = await new Builder().forBrowser("chrome").build();
try {
await driver.get("http://www.google.com/ncr");
await https.get("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users/1", (resp) => {
let data = "";
resp.on("data", (chunk) => {
data += chunk;
});
resp.on("end", async () => {
// console.log(JSON.parse(data)["name"]);
await driver
.findElement(By.name("q"))
.sendKeys(JSON.parse(data)["name"], Key.RETURN);
});
});
await driver.wait(until.titleContains("- Google Search"), 1000);
} finally {
await driver.quit();
}
})();
Or if you are already using library like axios, then you can do something like this
const { Builder, By, Key, until } = require("selenium-webdriver");
const axios = require("axios");
(async function example() {
let driver = await new Builder().forBrowser("chrome").build();
try {
await driver.get("http://www.google.com/ncr");
const { data } = await axios.get(
"https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users/1"
);
await driver.findElement(By.name("q")).sendKeys(data["name"], Key.RETURN);
await driver.wait(until.titleContains("- Google Search"), 1000);
} finally {
await driver.quit();
}
})();
Hope this is what you are looking for..