Selenium - Locators & Element location Strategies

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Locators & Element location Strategies

 Automating any application requires identification of the element & interact with it. Identification of Element is achieved using locators.


contain one or more elements/tags/nodes
An element may contain content/data or may contain other elements as child nodes.
Each element should have starting tag and ending tag. The element content will reside in between these two tags.
Apart from the content each tag may have attributes. These attributes will give extra information about the element.

Locator are used for identifying the elements on the web page uniquely

 1.      Location strategies by attributes –

a.      ID

b.      Name

c.      Class name - with spaces – not allowed – [Compound class names not allowed error] – when required to identify group of elements like radio buttons, checkboxes

2.      Location strategies for collection of elements

a.      Tagname - to identify group of elements

3.      Link text – when Tagname is anchor tag <a>

4.      Partial link text

5.      CSS selector

6.      Xpath

a.      Based on attribute - //tagName[@attribute=’value’]

b.      Based on text - //tagname[text()=’value’]

c.      Based for collections – (Xpath)[index]

Advanced Xpath - Axes

1.      Child to Parent/ancestor & vice versa

a.      Child to Parent – child xpath/parent::parent tagname

b.      Child to Grand Parent – child xpath/ancestor::ancestor tagname

c.      Parent to child – Parent xpath/child tagname

d.      Parent to Grand Children – (Parent xpath//child tagname)[index]

2.      Siblings – belonging under same parent tag

a.      Xpath/following-sibling::tagname

b.      Xpath/preceding-sibling::tagname

3.      Siblings[cousins] – belonging under different parent sibling tags

a.      Xpath/following::tagname

b.      Xpath/preceding::tagname


XPath functions

  • Count()
  • Contains() - //tagname[contains(text(), ‘’)]
  • Starts-with() - //tagname[starts-with(@id, ‘’)]
  • ends-with() - //tagname[ends-with(@id, ‘’)]
  • Normalize-space() - //tagname[text()[normalize-space() = 'some label']


CSS Selector:

1. TagName

usage of the tag name individually to locate the element is not a good practise as multiple Elements may have same TagName.

Form

Input

 

2. Id

In order to use ID as locator we need to use ‘#’ symbol in front of ID.

#IDValue

 

3. ClassName

In order to use Class Name as locator we need to use dot symbol in front of class name.

.ClassName

 

4. Attributes

 

Single Attribute

TagName[attribute = ‘attributeValue’]

Multiple Attributes

tagName[attribute1=’attrValue1’][attribute2=’attrValue2’]

 

5. Contains

Needed to use ‘*’ symbol to identify the element.

tagName[attribute*=’partialAttributeValue’]

 

6. Starts-with

Needed to use ‘^’ symbol to identify the element.

tagName[attribute^=’AttributeStartValue’]

 

7. Ends With

Needed to use ‘$' symbol to identify the element.

tagName[attribute$=’attributeEndingValue’]

 

How to verify the created XPath/CSS is correct?

 

1.Press F12 to open up Chrome DevTools.

2.Elements panel should be opened by default.

3.Press Ctrl + F to enable DOM searching in the panel.

4.Type in XPath or CSS selectors to evaluate.

 

If there are matched elements, they will be highlighted in DOM.

 

Xpath - $x(“”)

CSS Selector - $(“”)

 

 

 

 

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