Handling Keyboard Events in Webdriver

What are keyboard events?

Keyboard events are actions that can be performed with keyboard such as Alt F4, Shift "A", Control+Alt+Delete.There may be scenarios were we need to perform typing like a keyboard in certain fields

How Selenium handles keyboard events?

Selenium offers Action class in order to handle the keyboard events.The Action is a user facing API for emulating complex user action events.

There are different methods that are offered by Action Class. Most commonly used for keyboard events are

• keyDown()- Press down a particular Key in keyboard, It can be Caps Lock or Shift button or any key present on keyboard
• KeyUp()- UnPress the a particular key in keyboard.  It can be Caps Lock or Shift button or any key present on keyboard 

Here is the code snippets for using the Actions

//Configure the Action

Action builder=new Action(driver)

//To press a particular key(e.g Shift key)

builder.keydown(keys.SHIFT)

The below types a capital letter text on Email id field present on the facebook page

 import java.io.File;  
 import java.io.IOException;  
 import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;  
 import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils;  
 import org.openqa.selenium.By;  
 import org.openqa.selenium.JavascriptExecutor;  
 import org.openqa.selenium.Keys;  
 import org.openqa.selenium.OutputType;  
 import org.openqa.selenium.TakesScreenshot;  
 import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;  
 import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;  
 import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;  
 import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;  
 import org.openqa.selenium.interactions.Action;  
 import org.openqa.selenium.interactions.Actions;  
 import org.testng.annotations.Test;  
 import org.*;  
  public class KeyboardEvents  
 {  
      public static void main(String[] args) {  
           WebDriver a = new FirefoxDriver();  
           a.manage().window().maximize();  
           a.get("http://www.facebook.com");  
           a.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(20, TimeUnit.SECONDS);  
           Actions builder = new Actions(a);  
           WebElement e=a.findElement(By.id("email"));  
           Action writeCapital=builder.keyDown(Keys.SHIFT).sendKeys(e, "abc").keyUp(Keys.SHIFT).build();  
           writeCapital.perform();  
      }  
 }  

Notes

1-WebElement is a class in Selenium which is currently used to store the email field location
2-Action class offers keyDown method which is used to press down a particular key
3-.build() method is used to combine different keys method in a single command.For example in below case we are pressing some key then sending some value to the field and then unpress the same key, so 3 different types of action took place in order to combine them build() method is used
4-Perform method is used here to execute the action.

Output

Capital "ABC" is typed on email id field