Adding "GetDownloadFolder" to WebDriver class?

[GHRyunosuke]

While there is already "SetDownloadFolder", how about adding a corresponding "GetDownloadFolder" that returns the current configured DownloadFolder?

It could come in handy when using "WaitForDownload":

With driver
    .WaitForDownload .GetDownloadFolder & fileName
End with

[6DiegoDiego9]

Hi @GHRyunosuke, how do you download the file?
If you use DownloadResource, the default path is the same, therefore you would not need to specify it again for WaitForDownload.

[GHRyunosuke]

I just click (via selenium VBA) the "download" button one would humanly click to download a file. Sometimes I would use "SetDownloadFolder" to set a specific folder, and then when i use "WaitForDownload", i kind of thinking, oh where did I set that folder to be previously ...

[GCuser99]

@GHRyunosuke I think that's an idea worth considering, but I can't find a straight-forward way of doing it.

The SetDownloadFolder method uses the Chrome Dev Protocol, but I haven't yet found a corresponding "get" command available. In principle, one could scrape the "location" element for the url "chrome://settings/downloads", but I think that would be awkward. It might be possible to hack the Chrome/Edge User Data directories for the desired info but solving that is beyond my pay grade :-). If you (or anyone else) can find a clean way of getting the browser's default download directory directly let us know and we will consider...

Anyway, I think the factory setting default folder for MOST systems is "%USERPROFILE%\Downloads". But the user/admin can alter that and set it to a different location in user's Chrome/Edge profile, so it's not a given.

The surest way to know what it is currently (in a programmatic sense) is to set it yourself. Do you use the SeleniumVBA.ini file? I use the pre-loaded capabilities feature in that to set the default download folder to my preference of ".\" so that I do not have to worry about setting it at runtime. That way I always know where the default location is and I can change that at runtime if needed using SetDownloadFolder. If you are interested in going that route, let us know if you have any questions about it - would love to assist if needed.

Cheers, Mike

PS: you might be thinking that it would be feasible to save the argument value from SetDownloadFolder as a global in the WebDriver class and then simply retrieve it with GetDownloadFolder. But that solution presupposes that SetDownloadFolder is always executed prior, which cannot be guaranteed (in my useage hardly ever). A reliable solution would return the default location directly from the browser itself.

[6DiegoDiego9]

If we can get the path of the profile folder of Chrome, we could also get it from the Preferences file as documented here.

[GHRyunosuke]

Thank you @GCuser99 for the kind reply, I just thought a "get" method would be easier than a "set" method... seems the background of this case is much deeper.

I think I would just use a variable to store the folder path when I use "SetDownloadFolder " and reuse it in "WaitForDownload" later.

[GCuser99]

Yeah @6DiegoDiego9 I had tried searching that "Preferences" file before I wrote my reply. My Chrome "Preferences" file does not have the "default_directory" key in the "download" dictionary. Does your Preferences have it?

[6DiegoDiego9]

I see this:

[GCuser99]

Yeah, I have that key under "savefile" dictionary, but it points to some file I manually saved a long time ago, not the downloads directory. Thanks for looking into it @6DiegoDiego9.