Correct way to focus an element in Selenium WebDriver using Java

What's the equivalent of selenium.focus() for WebDriver?

element.sendKeys("");

or

new Actions(driver).moveToElement(element).perform();

I have tried both of them and they worked, but which one would always work on all elements?

Which one is the correct way for any elements (such as button, link etc.)? This matters to me because the function will be used on different UI's.

The following code -

element.sendKeys("");

tries to find an input tag box to enter some information, while

new Actions(driver).moveToElement(element).perform();

is more appropriate as it will work for image elements, link elements, dropdown boxes etc.

Therefore using moveToElement() method makes more sense to focus on any generic WebElement on the web page.

For an input box you will have to click() on the element to focus.

new Actions(driver).moveToElement(element).click().perform();

while for links and images the mouse will be over that particular element,you can decide to click() on it depending on what you want to do.

If the click() on an input tag does not work -

Since you want this function to be generic, you first check if the webElement is an input tag or not by -

if("input".equals(element.getTagName()){
   element.sendKeys("");
} 
else{
   new Actions(driver).moveToElement(element).perform();

}

You can make similar changes based on your preferences.

You can use JS as below:

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
JavascriptExecutor jse = (JavascriptExecutor) driver;
jse.executeScript("document.getElementById('elementid').focus();");

This code actually doesn't provide focus:

new Actions(driver).moveToElement(element).perform();

It provides a hover effect.

Additionally, the JS code .focus() requires that the window be active in order to work.

js.executeScript("element.focus();");

I have found that this code works:

element.sendKeys(Keys.SHIFT);

For my own code, I use both:

element.sendKeys(Keys.SHIFT);
js.executeScript("element.focus();");

The focus only works if the window is focused.

Use ((JavascriptExecutor)webDriver).executeScript("window.focus();"); to be sure.

FWIW, I had what I think is a related problem and came up with a workaround: I wrote a Chrome Extension that did an document.execCommand('paste') into a textarea with focus on window unload in order to populate the element with the system clipboard contents. This worked 100% of the time manually, but the execCommand returned false almost all the time when run under Selenium.

I added a driver.refresh() after the initial driver.get( myChromeExtensionURL ), and now it works 100% of the time. This was with Selenium driver version 2.16.333243 and Chrome version 43 on Mac OS 10.9.

When I was researching the problem, I didn't see any mentions of this workaround, so I thought I'd document my discovery for those following in my Selenium/focus/execCommand('paste') footsteps.