[Bug]: context.tracing() breaks Inspector

Playwright version

1.14.1

Operating system

Windows

What browsers are you seeing the problem on?

No response

Other information

No response

What happened? / Describe the bug

Having context.tracing() and page.pause() in the same test breaks the inspector.

1. Record doesn’t work
2. “step over” is not consistent with end result when the test run finishes - Inspector’s console says “element does receive pointer events” (first click), however, the test still fails with “element doesn’t receive pointer events” seconds later

To reproduce:

1. Run the code example below, wait until the inspect comes up
2. Hit “Record” and click around - no code gets generated
3. Step over - see Inspector log say “element does receive pointer events”, but the test will fail with “element doesn’t receive pointer events”

Note: this has only been reproduced in Java, not sure if the same behaviour can be observed in other language bindings.

Code snippet to reproduce your bug

public class _2TraceViewer {

    Playwright pw;
    Browser browser;

    @Test
    public void traceViewerDemo() {

        pw = Playwright.create();
        browser = pw.chromium().launch(new BrowserType.LaunchOptions().setHeadless(false).setSlowMo(1000));

        BrowserContext context = browser.newContext();

        // Start tracing before creating / navigating a page.
        context.tracing().start(new Tracing.StartOptions()
                .setScreenshots(true)
                .setSnapshots(true));

        Page page = context.newPage();
        page.setDefaultTimeout(8_000);
        page.navigate("https://playwright.dev/java/");
        page.pause();
        page.click("text=Get Started");
        page.click("text=Guides");
        page.click("text=Trace Viewer");
        Assertions.assertTrue(page.isVisible("text=Recording a trace"));


        // Stop tracing and export it into a zip archive.
        context.tracing().stop(new Tracing.StopOptions()
                .setPath(Paths.get("trace.zip")));
    }

    @AfterEach
    public void cleanup() {
        browser.close();
        pw.close();
    }
}

Relevant log output

No response

[jhyot]

I think I’ve run into the same problem. Maybe you need to say how you execute the repro. I my case it was with the IntelliJ JUnit runner, and no PWDEBUG set (can’t remember which way the headless setting was).

At the page.pause(); line, the execution will stop, and the inspector will open, but using record from there will not generate any code. I just chalked it up to some weird bug and just stopped using pause, since I didn’t really need it.

I don’t have time to reproduce it anymore or to try different conditions (since it’s not an important feature for me), but just putting a “me too” here, if anybody is interested.

[andrejs-ps]

The expectation is simply to have a working inspector (clicking generates code) when there’s also context.tracing() in the code as in the provided example. It’s not a blocker, of course, so if it’s not reproducible by anyone else, I’m happy to close it or rephrase the issue to focus on the issue that you do see - “if you click Record while paused then clicking ‘Step over’ will continue execution of the script”.