[🚀 Feature]: Methods `Select.select*()` should NOT allow selecting DISABLED option (or select)

[asolntsev]

Feature and motivation

Currently Select methods work even the option is disabled. Or select is disabled.

I suggest these selectByFoo methods should throw an exception.

Usage example

new Select(element).selectByVisibleText("fish");

Pull request

see #10814

[github-actions]

@asolntsev, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

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[diemol]

Is this something you see in all browsers or in an specific browser? I am probably wrong, but I was reading the WebDriver spec and in 14.1 (https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver1/#element-click), step 7 talks about

If element is not disabled

But I assume it talks about the whole element, not the specific options. I just want to understand better the problem, and figure out if this needs a fix in Selenium or in the WebDriver spec.

@titusfortner @AutomatedTester @jimevans what do you think?

[asolntsev]

@diemol I am not sure about the spec, but in reality both <select> and <option> can have disabled attribute.

1. In first case, you cannot select any options
2. In second case, you can select other options except the disabled one.

[titusfortner]

No, Selenium should not prevent a user from clicking anything they want. A disabled element could theoretically have any number of JS event listeners.

That's why the spec allows all the other actions to be taken on a disabled option element except for the part about changing "selectedness".

The driver is doing the right thing and Selenium is doing the right thing.

[titusfortner]

Watir, on the other hand, does prevent this, because as a tester, 99% of the time trying to select something that is disabled is wrong, so we've added extra logic to raise an error for it.

@asolntsev we discussed this a couple years ago about why Watir subclasses elements. This is a good use case. Watir automatically waits for an element to be enabled if it is one of Input, Button, Select, Option and otherwise ignores whether the element is enabled.

[titusfortner]

Hmm, to argue with myself a second, this *is in an opinionated class. The intention of "select" is different from the intention of "click" even if that is the implementation detail happening below.

[titusfortner]

This is one of those weird places where Selenium tries to have it both ways. It's "just browser automation" (aka "do what I say"), except it also has these support classes to provide "do what I mean" behaviors, but only in some cases, and not implemented in a way that can really be uniformly applied throughout a test framework.

[titusfortner]

Ok, I've convinced myself that this is should be considered a bug for this class as written. But as @pujagani pointed out in the PR, this isn't just a Java issue.

[asolntsev]

This is a good question how the library should behave. :)

I made a small experiment.

1. Give a disabled select (like <select id="frozen" disabled><option value=""></option><option value="anna">Anna</option></select>), or
2. Given a select with disabled option (like <select id="frozen"><option value=""></option><option value="anna" disabled>Anna</option></select>)

In both cases, Selenium behaves differently from real browser/user:

    Select select = new Select($("#frozen"));
    select.selectByVisibleText("Anna");   // does NOT fail, looks like succeeded
    select.getFirstSelectedOptions();   // returns ANOTHER option (the first empty option)

While the end-users cannot select any options at all.
I believe this is a bug. Clicking this option is not even possible in #1 case - the end user doesn't even see the options.

[diemol]

One thing I am still missing is if this behavior is present in just one browser or in all of them. Which browsers have you tried?

[titusfortner]

I believe all browsers are doing the right thing according to the spec. The issue is only whether Selenium should be more opinionated in this support class implementation, and I think @asolntsev makes a good case for it.

The user should be allowed to "click" a disabled option element and the browsers will do what the spec tells them to without error.

If the user wants to "select" an option via the higher level Select class, though, that method should error if the option is not in a state that can be selected. The current implementation just executes the click which, per the spec, doesn't change "selectedness." If the intent is to select, Selenium should error.