webdriverio/webdriverio

Hey everyone.

Still need help with that one.

I got a question regarding preparing data in onPrapare() hook.

We started to work with an old legacy project and the only way to prepare the test data for it, is the UI.
I need to create a couple of users before all the tests in all browser will be run, so only onPrepare() fits the purpose. But the problem is that global browser isn't instantiated yet during onPrepare() hook. The solution can be to use webdriver in standalone mode:

const { remote } = require('webdriverio');

(async () => {
    const standalone_browser = await remote({
        logLevel: 'trace',
        capabilities: {
            browserName: 'chrome'
        }
    })
//

but unfortunatelly some part of the code that I need to use during setup are already wrote in a pageObject pattern. And to use it, I need to use standalone_browser instead of a global browser, so pageObjects can use methods e.g. $ and $$. And I don't really want to rewrite those pageObjects because they are using my own framework wrappers that adds information to report automatically.

So the question is, is there a way to instantiate browser and use it globally on the onPrepare() hook. My first idea was just set global.browser = standalone_browser but unfortunately PageObjects still don't see $ method in this case.

When I use global.browser = standalone_browser it will allow to use browser.url in pageObject. But on first find methods it falls with ReferenceError: $ is not defined so my suggestion that this method references to global browser was wrong.

May be @christian-bromann can help with such specific question.