How to programmatically set download path in Protractor?

Question

I am trying to dynamically set the Chrome download path in conf.js for Protractor. Our webservice exports a file and I am writing a test that needs to know where the download file is going to be in order to verify it. Right now, I am hard setting the browser's download path. The problem is that other members of my team and the build machines will also be running this test and there is no single download path I could choose that would work on every dev and build machine. After doing some reading, I thought the best solution would be get the user data directory from the getCapabilities() function inside the onPrepare function, and then set that as the download directory, like so:

onPrepare: function () {
    var jasmineReporters = require('jasmine-reporters');
    jasmine.getEnv().addReporter(new jasmineReporters.JUnitXmlReporter( { 
        savePath: 'reports', consolidateAll: true } ));
    var cap = browser.getCapabilities();
    // Set prefsDict using cap.caps_.userDataDir
},
capabilities: {
    'chromeOptions': {
        'prefs': prefsDict
    }
}

This would allow the code to be dynamic, but getCapabilities returns a promise, so the code above is not going to work because conf.js will finish constructing the config object before the promise resolves. Using a then function on getCapabilities doesn't help because I can't construct the capabilities section of my config object in the then function. I can't call getCapabilities outside of the onPrepare function because conf.js itself doesn't have context for it. Setting a network path is also not feasible for the team's setup.

Has anyone else tackled something like this? Is there any other way to programmatically set the download path for Chrome?

Answer 1

This probably doesn't solve the issue in the way you'd like, but you could run

protractor conf.js --capabilities.chromeOptions.prefs 'path/to/user/folder'

if the user is savvy enough to know, find, or store that information.

---

Edit:

You might be able to use .execute() to force the browser.getCapabilities(); to fulfill before moving to the next statement.

Normally called by protractor.promise.controlFlow().execute( myPromise )

However, I think execute() also returns a promise, so you might be back to square one with this idea.