Coding for workarounds so you know when they are not needed

With most libraries you use to automate your work, you have to code workarounds. Here is a strategy for being informed when the workaround is no longer required.

TLDR; add an exception in your workaround to throw when the conditions you are working around are met.

I coded a workaround in my Selenium WebDriver tests because there was a bug in ChromeDriver which meant that cookies were created differently than other browsers.

When I upgraded to WebDriver 2.53.0 and ChromeDriver 2.21. I discovered I didn’t need my workaround anymore.

In the code I had one set of code for Chrome, and another set for other browsers:

// chromedriver has a bug where the domain is prefixed with '.' 
//therefore
// the app 'updates' a new cookie so when chromedriver
// returns the cookie it returns
// the first and not the updated one
if(Driver.currentBrowser()== Driver.BrowserName.GOOGLECHROME){
  aCookie = getCookieWithLargestValueNamed
               ("seleniumSimplifiedSearchNumVisits");
}else {
  aCookie = driver.manage().getCookieNamed(
                "seleniumSimplifiedSearchNumVisits");
}

The bug was 7499 and was fixed in the recent update to ChromeDriver.

How do I know it was fixed?

Because I had failing @Test methods.

Tests in error:
  changeCookieVisitsCountUsingCookieBuilder
  (com.seleniumsimplified.webdriver.cookies.
   CookiesExercisesTestWorkWithExtraSync): 
  Chrome cookie creation issue has been resolved
  changeCookieVisitsCount(
    com.seleniumsimplified.webdriver.cookies.
    CookiesExercisesTestWorkWithExtraSync): 
  Chrome cookie creation issue has been resolved

Why did they fail (the workaround was still valid)?

Because I had code that checked for that.

// This currently fails on Chrome Driver since
// ChromeDriver adds some extra cookies when it creates 
// a cookie with a domain
// https://code.google.com/p/selenium/issues/detail?id=7499
if(Driver.currentBrowser() != Driver.BrowserName.GOOGLECHROME){
  assertEquals("we added the cookie correctly", cookieCount, 
               driver.manage().getCookies().size());
}else{
  if(driver.manage().getCookies().size()==cookieCount){
    throw new RuntimeException(
                 "Chrome cookie creation issue has been resolved");
  }
// also Chromedriver now adds a '.' in front of the domain
}

I added extra code to throw an error, if the problem I was coding a workaround for went away.

I don’t know if that is a normal practice. But since I don’t really want workarounds in my code forever, and I likely won’t remember to check the release notes on every fix to see if I coded a workaround for a fix. This seems like a good workaround to check if workarounds are no longer good.

The code I was using to check for the largest value in a cookie, by the way, was:

private Cookie getCookieWithLargestValueNamed(String cookieName) {
    int largestCookieVal=0;
    Cookie largestCookie=null;
    for(Cookie aCookie : driver.manage().getCookies()){
        if(aCookie.getName().contentEquals(cookieName)){
            int cookieVal = Integer.parseInt(aCookie.getValue());
            if(cookieVal>largestCookieVal) {
                largestCookieVal = cookieVal;
                largestCookie = aCookie;
            }
        }
    }
    return largestCookie;
}