[🚀 Feature]: Support passing Pathname objects for preference values in Ruby

[md5]

Feature and motivation

After spending some time trying to track down why my download.default_directory preference for Chrome was not being honored, I determined that the issue was that I was passing a Pathname object instead of a String (via Rails.root.join). It would be great if the Ruby bindings honored Pathname objects by automatically calling #to_s on them. Barring that, it should at least error out instead of silently dropping the preference.

Usage example

options = Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Options.new
options.add_preference(
  :download,
  prompt_for_download: false,
  directory_upgrade: true,
  default_directory: Rails.root.join('tmp', 'capybara-downloads')
)

Currently, I have to pass Rails.root.join('tmp', 'capybara-downloads').to_s to get this to work.

[github-actions[bot]]

@md5, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

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[titusfortner]

So, the driver wants JSON, and Selenium is converting the provided Hash into JSON. Pathname is not a valid JSON data type. I guess we *could recursively parse everything and call #to_s for everything that isn't valid JSON type, but tbh this really should be responsibility of the user.

[p0deje]

Are you sure that it's Pathname used? I've just tried locally and it seems to convert to string correctly:

options = Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Options.new
options.add_preference(
  :download,
  prompt_for_download: false,
  directory_upgrade: true,
  default_directory: Pathname.new('/foo/bar')
)
Selenium::WebDriver.logger.level = :debug
driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for(:chrome, options: options)
...
2023-03-15 09:02:36 INFO Selenium -> POST session
2023-03-15 09:02:36 INFO Selenium    >>> http://127.0.0.1:9515/session | {"capabilities":{"alwaysMatch":{"browserName":"chrome","goog:chromeOptions":{"prefs":{"download":{"prompt_for_download":false,"directory_upgrade":true,"default_directory":"/foo/bar"}}}}}}

[md5]

Are you sure that it's Pathname used? I've just tried locally and it seems to convert to string correctly

Perhaps not? I was definitely seeing default_directory omitted when I called options.to_json and it stopped being an issue when I called #to_s on the Pathname, but your test looks valid. The implementation of #as_json for Pathname also clearly just calls #to_s: https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/main/activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/object/json.rb#L230-L234

That code is unchanged since at least Rails 5.1.0... So I guess I'll close this issue as invalid. There was definitely something weird going on, but I'm not sure anymore what it was.

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