getDrivers

GetDrivers is a general software concept referring to a function or method that retrieves references to driver components available to a system or application. In this context, drivers are software modules that provide an interface to hardware devices, external services, or plug-in implementations within an application, as well as test automation drivers such as browsers. The function is commonly used to discover, enumerate, and access these drivers in a consistent way.

The exact behavior of getDrivers varies by framework but typically returns a collection of drivers or descriptors that describe each driver. A call may accept optional filters to narrow the results by type, status, capability, or other metadata. The return value is often a list or map of Driver objects, each containing properties such as id, name, type, version, and current status. Depending on the environment, the operation can be synchronous or asynchronous and may throw errors if enumeration fails or if permissions are insufficient.

In practice, getDrivers enables scenarios such as listing all installed OS device drivers, retrieving available WebDriver instances for browser automation, or gathering registered plugin drivers within an application. Example usage might be getDrivers({type: 'web', status: 'loaded'}) returning a collection of WebDriver instances, each with identifying fields like id, name, and version.

Considerations when using getDrivers include security and permission requirements for enumerating drivers, performance implications in systems with many drivers, and the need for consistent API semantics across platforms. Related concepts include driver registries, driver loaders, and driver management utilities.