public void startBrowser(String pstrBaseUrl, String pstrTimeou
+tInMilliseconds) throws Exception
        {
        browser = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, "*chrome", ps
+trBaseUrl);
        browser.start();
        browser.setTimeout(pstrTimeoutInMilliseconds);
        }
[download]

This one is better:

    RemoteControlConfiguration rcc = new RemoteControlConfiguration();
    rcc.reuseBrowserSessions();
    SeleniumServer ss = new SeleniumServer(rcc);
    ss.start();
[download]

What is the RemoteControlConfiguration()? or is that a home made function somewhere

Try manually setting/reusing

my $sel = ...->new( session_id => 'magic string',
# OR
$sel->{session_id} =  'magic string';
[download]

or, if getExistingBrowserSession exists

$sel->{session_id} = $sel->get_string("getExistingBrowserSession", 
                                            $sel->{browser_start_comma
+nd}, 
                                            $sel->{browser_url});
[download]

Thanks that's great!
This seems to sort of work, it does grab the same session if the session_id is in the constructor). I just found that I can get the existing session_id using
$sel->retrieve_last_remote_control_logs();

And can probably regex it out (I'm cut& pasting right now) - and store it somewhere if I leave the server running and relaunch my automation. Otherwise make a new session and then save teh session_id with that command or yours.

Selenium complains if I give it a 'magic string' that is not a real existing session_id, but if I give it the id of a real, existing session that is up it seems happy to use it. That seems to mean it can't be started up with arbitary session_id the server has to generate one - but if that can be captured it can be reused

However, selenium seems to require me to open a URL

$sel->open_ok("$url");

before it will allow clicking on anything. However this makes my site think I'm navigating away and makes a popup forcing me to choose to log out or abanodon the new attempts at hijacking the session! Needless to say, I didn't write the site I'm just trying to get it to do something quicker than I can type.

Still this is progress!! - Thanks so much

(off to bed now - I'll type up a full solution when I get it working)

Also "session_id = Optional argument that can be used to reuse session_ids between test runs. This can make for faster testing." is mentioned as arguments for:

$sel = WWW::Selenium->new( %args )

In some (old?) documentation here:

http://release.seleniumhq.org/selenium-remote-control/1.0-beta-2/doc/perl/WWW-Selenium.html#element_locators

but not in cpan