Ability to use types which extend WebElement. findElement/findElements methods

[TikhomirovSergey]

There are a lot of projects that extends Selenium Webdriver. And the returning of WebElement is not comfortable because there is the necessity to cast the result each time.

Here is the sample from Appium:

 (MobileElement) driver.findElementBy(By.class("someClass"))

In order to avoid this inconvenience these things are proposed:

• now SearcContext and similar interfaces return the generic result insted of WebElement
• this change is implemented by RemoteWebDriver and RemoteWebElement

It is backward compatible with current projects and it gives some more points:

• now we can get RemoteWebElement directly

RemoteWebElementr = driver.findElementBy(By.class("someClass"))

• if some project contains RemoteWebElement subclasses whose objects are returned using customized JsonToWebElementConverter implementions
  then there is no need to cast the result each time.

[bootstraponline]

👍

[Jonahss]

👍

[barancev]

Is it worth to add new tests for this feature?

[TikhomirovSergey]

@barancev In order to demonstrate that the new feature is ok today I can add two new tests. They will check these cases

RemoteWebElementr = driver.findElement(someBy);

and

List<RemoteWebElement> rList = driver.findElements(someBy);

[jleyba]

I'm opposed to this change as it weakens the contract on SearchContext by implying it's capable of returning specific subtypes of WebElements:

interface FooWebElement extends WebElement {
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
SearchContext sc = new RemoteWebDriver(null);
FooWebElement el = sc.findElement(By.id("bar"));
}

[TikhomirovSergey]

@jleyba Thanks for the remark. I will try to find the way to avoid the problem that you have mentioned

[TikhomirovSergey]

Ok. I can't find the correct way to resolve the possible problem mentioned by @jleyba. So I am closing this PR. I will propose something better next time.

Thanks for the attention.

[andreastt]

Thanks for the work you put into this, @TikhomirovSergey.