Selenium: Presence of a particular WebElement on all pages in the website - selenium

Question

We have a search widget at the top of the page in all the pages. I want to check, if that widget is visible on all the pages of the website. Is there any smarter way, rather than going to all the pages and checking it?

Answer 1

Answering straight, when you want to check if an widget is visible or not we should have used a method isVisible(). But isVisible() was available in Selenium RC which is deprecated in current WebDriver implementations. Instead referring to the documentation we can use either of these methods isDisplayed(), isEnabled() or isSelected().
So when you speak about search widget at the top of the page in all the pages I feel isDisplayed() method fits into your requirement. For example let us take an example of the Search field on stackoverflow.com Homepage which is available on all the pages. Now we want to check, if that widget is visible on all the pages of the website or not. A sample code block can be as follows:
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
public class A_Firefox
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "C:\\Utility\\BrowserDrivers\\geckodriver.exe");
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
driver.get("https://stackoverflow.com");
System.out.println("Application opened");
System.out.println("Page Title is : "+driver.getTitle());
WebElement my_element = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[#name='q']"));
if(my_element.isDisplayed())
{
System.out.println("Element is displayed");
}
else
{
System.out.println("Element is not displayed");
}
driver.quit();
}
}
The output on my console is:
Application opened
Page Title is : Stack Overflow - Where Developers Learn, Share, & Build Careers
Element is displayed
Enhancement:
As an enhancement you can create a function as presenceOfSearchBox(WebElement ele) and pass the WebElement as an argument from every page you visit to validate if the widget is displayed or not as follows:
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
public class A_Firefox
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "C:\\Utility\\BrowserDrivers\\geckodriver.exe");
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
driver.get("https://stackoverflow.com");
System.out.println("Application opened");
System.out.println("Page Title is : "+driver.getTitle());
WebElement my_element = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[#name='q']"));
presenceOfSearchBox(my_element);
driver.quit();
}
public static void presenceOfSearchBox(WebElement ele)
{
if(ele.isDisplayed())
{
System.out.println("Element is displayed");
}
else
{
System.out.println("Element is not displayed");
}
}
}