Protractor: Testing Angular App in an Iframe

Testing iframes with protractor is a little bit tricky. It took me a while and a lot of patience to sort of understand what was going on. I hope this helps!

Protrator is built upon WebdriverJS, so you can use the whole package to test iframes. When you start testing with protractor, the first thing you do is get an instance of protractor:

var ptor = protractor.getInstance();

But to test what you have inside the iframe you will need ptor.driver instead of ptor!

var driver = ptor.driver;

Then, when you start writing the test, you find the iframe, you switch to it, you test it with 'driver' and you switch back to the initial frame.

ptor.switchTo().frame(driver.findElement(protractor.By.xpath('xpath-to-iframe')));// Test iframe with driverdriver.findElement(protractor.By.xpath('some-sort-of-input')).sendKeys('username');driver.findElement(protractor.By.xpath('other-sort-of-input')).sendKeys('password');driver.findElement(protractor.By.xpath('other-sort-of-button')).click();// Switch back to Default Contentptor.switchTo().defaultContent();// And WAIT for angular!!ptor.waitForAngular();

The code that follows is a general example of what I mentioned above:

describe('Protractor iframe Test', function(){  var ptor, driver;  beforeEach(function(){    ptor = protractor.getInstance();    driver = ptor.driver;  });  it('should test the iframe', function(){    ptor.switchTo().frame(driver.findElement(protractor.By.xpath('xpath-to-iframe')));    // Test iframe with driver    driver.findElement(protractor.By.xpath('some-sort-of-input')).sendKeys('username');    driver.findElement(protractor.By.xpath('other-sort-of-input')).sendKeys('password');    driver.findElement(protractor.By.xpath('other-sort-of-button')).click();    // At this point, you can expect() things to happen to the iframe app    // Switch back to Default Content    ptor.switchTo().defaultContent();    // And WAIT for angular!!    ptor.waitForAngular();    // Then you can keep testing (or expecting something!)    expect('this answer').toBe('useful');  });});

With protractor 2.5.1, @lthilon's answer was giving an 'Invalid Locator' error.

The following syntax resolved that though:

    var driver = browser.driver;    var loc = by.tagName('iframe');    var el = driver.findElement(loc);    browser.switchTo().frame(el);    driver.findElement(by.tagName('body')).sendKeys('my test string');    browser.switchTo().defaultContent();    browser.waitForAngular();

Switching to an iframe is very simple according to latest protractor API docs 5.4.1:

await browser.switchTo().frame(element(by.xpath('//iframe')).getWebElement());

The context switches to the specified iframe, now every command that you run will be executed on the iframe. Now you can even switch to nested iframes. To switch back to parent iframe:

 driver.switchTo().parentFrame();