EventFiringWebDriver should not be instantiable directly

[lukeis]

Originally reported on Google Code with ID 2510

A "new EventFiringWebDriver(...)" statement is needed to use this class. This is not
in the spirit of WebDriver's API where the functionalities are split among interfaces.
The consequence is that a driver wrapped this way won't implement the same interfaces
than the wrapped one (see attached unit test).

The right solution to would be to prohibit direct instantiation and to use a dynamic
proxy like it is done for RemoteDriver in the Augmenter class.

Reported by mguillemot@yahoo.fr on 2011-09-21 07:08:21

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- _Attachment: [patchTestEventFiringWebDriver.txt](https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-attachments/selenium/issue-2510/comment-0/patchTestEventFiringWebDriver.txt)_

[lukeis]

Reported by barancev on 2011-10-13 09:08:39

• Labels added: Component-WebDriver, Lang-Java

[lukeis]

Hi!

Is this issue still actual?

Reported by a.u.savchuk on 2013-10-01 11:16:12

[lukeis]

Yes it is still actual.

Reported by mguillemot@yahoo.fr on 2013-10-01 15:39:26

[lukeis]

Dumb question time: if this is how you'd like the EventFiringWebDriver to be a dynamic
proxy, why not use the Proxy class from Java?

Reported by simon.m.stewart on 2014-01-29 17:01:10

• Status changed: NeedsClarification

[lukeis]

2 1/2 years ago... difficult to remember.

Looking at the issues again it seems to me that the WebDriver API should provide a
method wrapping the provided WebDriver instance as needed with a Proxy to return something
that implements *all* interfaces of the original instance plus a "EventFiringWebDriver
interface".

In other words:
EventFiringWebDriver decoratedDriver = decorate(driver)
and for each interface I, driver implements I => decoratedDriver implements I

Reported by mguillemot@yahoo.fr on 2014-01-30 17:17:29

[lukeis]

I do effort implementing such a wrapper as a side project, see [1]. I think it is not
worth to pollute the core Selenium distribution with EventFiringWedDriver at all. It
is a language specific extension that can be distributed separately.

[1] https://github.com/barancev/webdriver-extensions/tree/master/webdriver-wrapper

Reported by barancev on 2014-01-30 17:40:56

[lukeis]

Reported by luke.semerau on 2015-09-17 17:44:25

• Labels added: Restrict-AddIssueComment-Commit