How to change the active chat in web whatsapp via selenium or javascript with Python 3

Question

I am steering web whatsapp via selenium via Python, i was wondering if it is possible to change the active (top chat. If a message is recieved, the chat won't be set as active, it will always remain in the background.

In Javascript, one can see a list of all chat in the consoles via:

Store.chat.models

The active chat is stored at position zero, however overwriting the position zero with another chat will not make the chat active.

I have found out that there is a variable called "x_active" which changes if a chat is clicked on and view to true (and all others have it as false).

e.g.:

Store.Chat.models[0].__x_active

However setting the variable or true or false in the chrome Console tab did not change anything in the UI, so how can I achieve such behaviour?

A bit unclear. You want to move a chat to top by yourself? Or you want to click on the topmost chat? Or something else? — Tarun Lalwani, Dec 08 '17 at 14:08
I want to move the chat by myself, but clicking on the topmost chat is my current ugly workaround which does the same thing (but moves my mouse away) — Kev1n91, Dec 08 '17 at 15:33
Even if you do it nice, mouse will be moved by Selenium on click or focus. If you want the mouse in the previous location, save that location, do your click stuff then set mouse back to it's position. — m3nda, Jan 17 '23 at 08:22

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 08 '17 at 14:35

4

You'll need to use selenium to click on the contact in the left pane to make it active. You can easily find the place to click using the CSS selector like this:

driver.find_element_by_css_selector('span[title="Contact Name"]').click()

To easily identify which contacts have unread messages, you can use your JavaScript Store.chat.models list, and find objects in the list with the variable __x_hasUnread = True, and the value of the variable __x_formattedTitle to find the contact name to use for the find above.

answered Dec 08 '17 at 14:35

Breaks Software

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Where do you found the 'driver' variable? Where is that stored? – Renan Coelho May 04 '18 at 23:45
'driver' would be your webdriver variable – Breaks Software May 06 '18 at 18:58

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 10 '17 at 06:29

in whatsapp web if you inspect you can see that contact name resides in div with class '.chat'.

you can add listener to contacts in left side in whatsapp web by executing the following script in your whatsapp_login function. Following is the whatsapp_login function:

def whatsapp-login(request):
    global driver

    profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
    profile.accept_untrusted_certs = True
    driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=profile)

    driver.get('https://web.whatsapp.com/')

    script_path = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
    script = open(os.path.join(script_path, "add_eventlistener.js"), "r").read()

    driver.execute_script(script)

following is the add_listener script which uses MutationObserver:

var observer = new MutationObserver(function(mutations) {
            mutations.forEach(function(mutation) {
                if(mutation.attributeName === 'class') {

                    var attributeValue = $(mutation.target).prop(mutation.attributeName);
                    console.log("attributeValue: "+attributeValue);
                    if(attributeValue.indexOf('hover') > -1) {

                        var user = $(mutation.target).find('.chat-title').find('span').attr('title');
                        console.log('Class attribute changed to:', attributeValue);

                        $.ajax({
                            url: 'url of change active chat function',
                            type: "POST",
                            data: {"user": user},
                            headers: {"Access-Control-Allow-Origin": "*"},
                            success: function(data) {
                                console.log(data);
                            },
                            error: function(data) {
                                console.log(data);
                            }
                        });
                    }
                }
            });
        });

        Array.prototype.forEach.call(document.querySelectorAll('.chat'), function(element, index) {
            console.log(element);
            observer.observe(element, {
                attributes: true
            });
        });

inside your change active chat function you can do the following to change active chat. Here you will get the user from ajax call and iterate through the contact list:

def change_active_chat(user):
    recentList = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//span[@class='emojitext ellipsify']")
        for head in recentList:
            if head.text == user:
                head.click()

head.click() will change the active chat.

Just for clarification: The javascript code is stored in add_eventlistener.js , correct? — Kev1n91, Dec 15 '17 at 11:10

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 15 '17 at 07:10

However setting the variable or true or false in the chrome Console tab did not change anything in the UI

You are changing the Boolean value but the request is not submitted as a result you wont see any change. My suggestion is to Click on the webElement using Xpath or CSS or any other convenient locator techniques first.

How to change the active chat in web whatsapp via selenium or javascript with Python 3

3 Answers3