Automate image upload with Selenium but without AutoIt

Question

I have a non-traditional, image upload button on my company's website. I want to have an automated way to upload an image using this button, but without having to use a tool like AutoIt in order to interact with the file explorer.

Here's a sample of this button's HTML:

<button ng-click="onClick()" ng-disabled="readOnly" accepted-types="image/*" on-files-selected="onFilesSelected" allow-multiple="true" readonly="readonly">Add images</button>

It's a bit different than the usual input element, e.g. <input type="file">, and it's using AngularJS. Since it's not an input element, I don't think I can use Selenium's sendKeys() function to input the image's file location on my machine.

Is there any hack or workaround to uploading the image? I was considering things like overwriting the onClick() function to do read from a specified location (this approach doesn't really seem like it's doable), or possibly intercepting the event that opens the file explorer and trying to hack my way from there, but these are all just unsupported and untested approaches to solving the problem.

Would it be possible to do this in another browser-automation tool, like Microsoft's Playwright?

Answer 1

Use JACOB it provides java native interface where you can use AutoIt functionalities with selenium here is a sample I am using it in most of the places like MSTeams,Slack for Automation[Upload Feature] it does the job.

List of Steps you need to do before jumping to the code:

Step 1: Download JACOB jar

Step 2: Register the AutoIt COM libraries e.g regsvr32 AutoItX3_x64.dll

Use these in your code

• jacob.jar
• AutoItX4Java.jar
• jacob-1.18-x64.dll
• jacob-1.18-x86.dll

Sample Code:

[This Code Interacts with file explorer]

import com.jacob.com.LibraryLoader;

import autoitx4java.AutoItX;

public class Attachments {

   public void uploadAttachments(){

        File f = new File("Location");
        File[] fil =f.listFiles();

        //Upload Button Xpath
        WebElement uploadFromComp = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//span[contains(text(),'Upload from my computer')]"));
        uploadFromComp.click();
        Thread.sleep(5000);

        String jacobDllVersionToUse;
        if (jvmBitVersion().contains("32")) {
            jacobDllVersionToUse = "jacob-1.19-x86.dll";
        } else {
            jacobDllVersionToUse = "jacob-1.19-x64.dll";
        }

        File file1 = new File("registerAutoItDll", jacobDllVersionToUse);
        System.setProperty(LibraryLoader.JACOB_DLL_PATH, file1.getAbsolutePath());

        AutoItX x = new AutoItX();
        x.winWaitActive("Open");
        x.sleep(5000);
        x.send(fil[j].getAbsolutePath());
        x.send("{ENTER}", false);
}}

I hope it works for you.

Answer 2

It is 100% posible with playwright and it is lot simplier then in the Selenium.

// Select one file
await page.setInputFiles('input#upload', 'myfile.pdf');

// Select multiple files
await page.setInputFiles('input#upload', ['file1.txt', 'file2.txt']);

See more on: https://playwright.dev/docs/input#upload-files