1579814 - Add support for handling in-content SubDialog (about:preferences)

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Remote Protocol :: Marionette, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Especially in about:preferences the sub dialogs are used a lot to block the ui while allowing the user to change certain preferences, or trigger actions. Sadly opening such a dialog doesn't trigger any of the known events like common-dialog-loaded or tabmodal-dialog-loaded. Also those dialogs cannot be queried via Services.wm.getEnumerator().

Mike or Gijs, do you have a hint in how we can support this kind of dialog for:

• Finding already open sub dialogs
• Listening for open and close events for those dialog

Thanks.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

The question is not really clear to me. Support for what purpose / in what context? What does marionette want with these dialogs?

The dialogs are loaded into iframes in about:preferences. But having strong dependencies between marionette / fx-functional tests and the markup in about:preferences seems like a terrible idea - the same kind of thing has been a pain in the past in other areas of the browser (e.g. page info dialog).

Comment 2

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #1)

The question is not really clear to me. Support for what purpose / in what context? What does marionette want with these dialogs?

There is no immediate request for that, but there could be. It's just that elements in those dialogs can be accessed and interacted with. Similar to any other modal, or tab modal dialog.

The dialogs are loaded into iframes in about:preferences. But having strong dependencies between marionette / fx-functional tests and the markup in about:preferences seems like a terrible idea - the same kind of thing has been a pain in the past in other areas of the browser (e.g. page info dialog).

When writing tests or automation scripts, the user indeed shouldn't know about all those implementation details, and as best simply continue to use the methods as defined in the WebDriver specification. Those are accept (ok), dismiss (cancel), get alert text, send alert text (see https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/#user-prompts).

Right now this API doesn't work when interacting with elements in the about:preferences tab.

Comment 3

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

We are not planning anymore to have tests for sub dialogs for about:preferences. If the request comes up again in the future we would have to re-evaluate this request.