C# browser automation that will work on server

Question

I have been using WatiN for some browser automation and website testing. Recently I received a request to automate some task that needs to check a partner website for existence of some SKU (since they don't have a proper API) and confirm transaction.

I tried using WatiN, but since this runs on a server and on-demand, the server desktop is naturally locked at most times and the IE window does not open and the process is never run.

I am looking for an alternative to WatiN, which is preferably a .net library (not a must, but just makes things easier), does not require a logged in user and being free and open source is always nice.

Anyone have experience with this type of automation?

Answer 1

You can use the Selenium WebDriver coupled with PhantomJS.

Selenium is similar in many ways to WaitN but it supports more browsers. PhantomJS is a headless browser and wrapped in a portable executable you can run from your web server.

Once you've added the NuGet packages, you will be able to instantiate a PhantomJS web driver and control a site without having to launch a full-fledged browser.

var driver = OpenQA.Selenium.PhantomJS.PhantomJSDriver();

We use this on build servers since the build agents are not logged in and won't be able to launch a normal browser process.

If you just need to check some HTML, you can use WebClient to make a request to the site, return the content response as a string and parse it.