Selenium Web driver - loop over elements and click if matches - selenium

Question

i'm in day 2 of my selenium class, need help in finding an efficient way of looping over elements and if matches click the link address.
I want to navigate from classFrame to navList and loop over to find the match and click.
public void switchFrames() {
driver.navigate().to("https://seleniumhq.github.io/selenium/docs/api/java/");
driver.switchTo().frame("classFrame");
/* List<WebElement> elements = driver.findElements(By.className("navList"));
for (WebElement element : elements) {
System.out.println(element.findElement(By.xpath(".//li/a")).getText());
}
*/
List<WebElement> items = driver.findElements(By.cssSelector("ul li"));
if ( items.size() > 0 ) {
for ( WebElement we: items ) {
we.findElement(By.linkText("Deprecated")).click();
}
}
driver.findElement(By.linkText("Deprecated")).click();
driver.close();
}

Answer 1

The main part you are missing and the reason you can't find the element you are looking for is because it's in a frame. In order to access elements in a frame with Selenium, you need to switch the driver context to the frame. You do that using driver.switchTo().frame(). Once you are done interacting with the frame, switch back to the default context using driver.switchTo().defaultContent().
Having said that... let me offer you some more advice since you are just starting out. There are several ways to do this. One way is like what you attempted... grab an element, find a child, loop through those children looking for the link you want. I prefer the more direct approach since we can search for the exact link using an XPath. What you want to do is to click the DEPRECATED link on the navbar. You could just use the By.linkText() locator and that will work but you want to be careful, especially with a page like this that has so many links, to not click on a link you didn't intend to. The way you do that is to narrow the search to the specific area you expect the link to be in, the navbar. Once you narrow the search there, you can quickly and safely find the link you are looking for. I prefer to do it in a single search using an XPath but you could use say a CSS selector to find the navbar area and then use By.linkText() to find the link, e.g.
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("ul[title='Navigation']").findElement(By.linkText("Deprecated").click();
In that case, you will be scraping the page twice. It's not likely a big performance hit, I just prefer to use a single locator when it makes sense. I would suggest that since you are likely to use this code over and over that you put it in a function and pass it the link name, e.g.
public void clickNavbar(String linkName)
{
driver.switchTo().frame(driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("frame[name='classFrame']")));
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//ul[#title='Navigation']//a[.='" + linkName + "']")).click();
driver.switchTo().defaultContent();
}
Then you can call it like, clickNavbar("Deprecated");