We’re proud to announce the release of Selenium Nodes 3.0! It is mainly aimed at improving usability to enhance your daily productivity. As usual, the upgrade is free for all current users. Here’s an overview of the most exciting new features:
DOM Outline and “XPath by Double Click”
The Find Elements node now gives you a live DOM outline view, allowing you to build your XPath selectors with a simple double click and showing the number of matches right away. If you’re used to KNIME’s XPath node, you’ll immediately feel at home (oh, and we have a search bar on top!). Finally, say goodbye to switching back and forth between KNIME and browser, copying selector expressions, and all this trial-and-error to get your selectors right!
Source Previews in Table Cells
Tired of cryptic cell content such as [[ChromeDriver: chrome on MAC (d5b438436ee10078c70350047aca7c6b)] -> xpath: //title]? Good news: We now show actually useful information — the corresponding DOM source. As we’ve seen during our beta phase, this is extremely helpful during development and debugging (nerd info: Creating the previews causes additional requests to the browser for each cell. A performance overhead should hardly be noticeable, but you can still turn off this feature in Preferences)
Bundled Chromium Browser
Some of you told us about issues caused by divergent browser versions when running workflows on different machines, or by browser updates which might break certain functionalities. We’re always quick with supplying fixes where necessary, but now we go even further: As an optional configuration, you can install a bundled Chromium (enable the checkbox “Selenium Nodes for KNIME: Chromium” during installation). This is the very same browser version against which our internal test suite runs, and it thus ensures compatibility, no matter what system-wide browsers you use.
Changelog
The detailed changelog is available here. You’ll probably notice that we updated the changelog page appearance as well, and added some structure and color to make it easier for you to navigate and spot all changes for each release.
What’s Next?
We’re aware that the entry barrier for new users is currently higher than it should. While we think we have addressed the mystery “How to build my XPath” quite well, we can improve still. We’re planning to offer additional training materials in the future — be it in the form of blog posts, sample workflows, video tutorials, etc. Anyways, we’re eager to hear from you on how to make Selenium Nodes more accessible for new users.
