In my WebDriver project, I have planned to add Jsoup to get 'parent' and 'siblings' and few other features. I need to find an element through Jsoup and click its parent using WebDriver. That means I need to convert a Joup element object to WebElement object. Please let me know how I can do this, if this is feasible.
If it is not possible to integrate Jsoup and WebDriver in such way, then please discuss on how I can get parents and all using WebDriver.
Also, is it possible to list ALL possible elements present under a particular WebElement?
It's quite interesting we're doing the similar approach, integrating JSoup and Selenium WebDriver. I can understand your issue especially dealing with some dynamic website based on some Javascript framework which has no stable IDs or attributes.
Our solution looks like the following, and hopefully it could be some advice for you:
webDriver.getPageSource() to get the current HTML source
use JSoup to parse this HTML source, and leverage Jsoup selector (which is much more powerful than Selenium) to locate the target element
get parents or siblings of this element
write an iteration function to get element xPath, such as //body/div[2]/form[1]/input[3]
webDriver.findElement(By.xpath(...)) to locate element in selenium context
EDITED
The idea of the iteration function is:
first check the tag of your parent node, if it is body, then iteration ends
if not , then use getSiblings to check the index of the node among all the nodes with same tag, e.g, the 3rd div, then equals to div[3]
iterate to your parent node, and do the same procedures
Once you get the xpath of the child node, and parent node, just replace parent node xpath to be empty string inside the child node xpath, finally you can get the relative xpath.
You can use xpath selectors to select parent and child elements
Related questions
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What about running findElements with xpath : .//* on your particular element? Also, look into xpath parent::* and following-sibling::*. For the particular case I understand, there is no need for Jsoup.
Related
Hi I am looking for an explanation on how selenium searches for an element on a website. For us, we use inspect element to find the id, name, xpath, etc. of an element, and then put it in selenium for some action to be done. How does selenium find the element we tell it to find? Does it ctrl shift J like us and inspect element?
Note: I am not looking for how to code selenium to find element.
Html pages are just documents with elements structured like in a tree.
In general
Selenium uses element locators to find things. Locators work lazily. When you look up an element Selenium first checks if its cached. If not, it uses SearchContext which finds all elements within the current context (eg. DOM element) using a given mechanism, for example by XPathEvaluator.
SearchContext runs findElement() if you are looking for one element or findElements() if you are looking for more than one.
In simple terms, findElement() tries to run JavaScript script to find the element asynchronously. If it can’t, it tries to find it directly by using an interestingly called method – xpathWizardry, i.e. by using XPathEvaluator evaluation.
XPath
When you use XPath (XML Path Language) in Selenium, this is just a way to navigate through hierarchical structure of an XML-like document, such as html.
XPath uses a non-XML syntax to provide a flexible way of pointing to different parts of an XML document.
Internally selenium uses W3 XPathEvaluator, which evaluates XPath expressions.
You can study XPathEvaluator source code here.
Search Context
The SearchContext is a topmost interface present in the Selenium WebDriver hierarchy. It has two methods that will be the abstract as SearchContext is an interface.
findElement(): Find the first WebElement using the given method.
WebElement findElement(By by)
Parameters:
by - The locating mechanism
Returns:
The first matching element on the current context
Throws:
NoSuchElementException - If no matching elements are found
findElements(): Find all elements within the current context using the given mechanism.
java.util.List<WebElement> findElements(By by)
Parameters:
by - The locating mechanism to use
Returns:
A list of all WebElements, or an empty list if nothing matches
The browser DOM exposes API like querySelector,querySelectorAll, getElementById, getElementsByClassName, getElementsByName, etc through javascript that can be used to locate elements.
For example :
Navigate to www.bing.com
Press F12 to open developer console.
Enter document.querySelector("#sb_form_q") to locate search box input by css selector. I am using #Id here as css selector.
Enter document.getElementById("sb_form_q") to locate search box input by it's Id
Enter document.getElementsByClassName("sb_form_q")[0] to locate search box input by it's class name
Enter document.getElementsByName("q")[0] to locate search box input by it's name
All of above should return "<input id="sb_form_q" class="sb_form_q" name="q" type="search" maxlength="1000" autocomplete="off" aria-label="Enter your search term" autofocus="" aria-controls="sw_as" aria-autocomplete="both" aria-owns="sw_as" aria-activedescendant="sa_5004">" same result.
Selenium uses these DOM API to retrieve the elements. However, selenium might use these DOM API via some other mechanism (e.g C ++) and not by executing javascript for faster execution. XPath lookup is something not supported directly by browser DOM API. Selenium probably provides it's own implementation for XPath lookup or rely on some browser polyfill for this functionality.
There are few elements in an UI page without ID. I will download a particular version and then save all the current element tags and give to script as input, since few elements are not having id, this is causing script failures.
How can I locate the element without using Xpath.
Is there any simple way when there is no fixed id.
The short answer is "no." Sorry. All of the usual ways (by id, class, etc.) are relying on the same css information to locate elements. Xpath just shows all the ugly plumbing out in public. I don't think xpath has ever been described as "simple" but there is usually a way, using xpath, to find any element.
Xpath can be intimidating. Start with a plugin that will generate the xpath for you, once you click on an element. Usually the xpath generated will be extremely long and inefficient, but with practice you can see what can be trimmed and what is crucial. And to do that, also use a plugin that will "check" your xpath to see if it can find the element. Once you can find it (and ONLY the element you want) try trimming it to see if you can still find it with the abbreviated xpath locator.
reference ImageDon't be afraid of Xpaths. It's relatively easy to grab an Xpath using the Google Chrome browser. Navigate to your page and open Developer tools. Right-click on the particular tag for which you need an Xpath. Copy -> Xpath
I’m facing a challenge in locating the elements in AG Grid. As I unable to locate the elements in the grid. Can we create the user define locator in selenium to locate the elements in AG Grid. Or Kindly suggest any other alternative to work with it. And it is prohibited to use either of the locators xpath, css selector, name, class in our project.
One more thing, is it possible to .
Kindly refer to the attached screenshots for the reference. Do let me know if you need any further information from my side.
Any help would be highly appreciated.
I tried locating the elements with other locators
below xpath should work,
//div[#col-id='locationName'][contains(text(),'Opthamology')]
If you cannot use anything but id - you should ask your application developers to add unique identifiers for each element.
If for some reason it is not possible - you can use WebDriver.executeScript() function which allows executing arbitrary JavaScript code which in its turn can evaluate various selector expressions, for example XPath, the relevant syntax for your case would be something like:
WebElement someElement = (WebElement) driver.executeScript("return document.evaluate('//div[contains(text(),\"Opthamology\")]', document, null, XPathResult.FIRST_ORDERED_NODE_TYPE, null).singleNodeValue;");
Thanks in advance!
I want to know if there is any way in CSS selector in which we can find nth element in page?
I believe in xpath if there multiple element which satisfies an xpath we can get nth element using below syntax:
//input[2] ' Select 2nd Input
Please note I am not looking for nth-child(n) or nth-of-type(n) which selects child element of parent.
Please note I am not looking for nth-child(n) or nth-of-type(n) which selects child element of parent.
That is how you locate the Nth element in CSS locators. If your looking for the Nth root element, you can use html or body as parent elements. By.CssLocator("body:nth(2)")
That seems like a strange solution though. Can you post more information describing your requirements? There may be a better way of locating the element than using a CSS locator. Of course if you have the ability to modify the source, than this could easily be fixed by design. I recommend using data-* attributes.
I am trying to learn Selenium and am trying to write the xpath locator for the "About Us" link on the web page - www.hdfc.com
I can do it with link as:
link=About Us
I have tried the following and it works fine:
xpath=//a[text()='About Us']
but I wanted to write the locator using xpath axes so that its flexible enough. Can someone please point me in the right direction?
In the case you have put forward the best selector you could use is ID, this is because IDs (much like classnames etc) are not dependent on the structure of the document at all but more about the content or purpose of the element. in this case you would want something like:
driver.findElements(By.Id("ic-aboutUs");
Another thing you should be aware of in general is that xpath expressions are considered a worse way to identify your elements than the use of CSS selectors, especially if you are testing in IE as the xpath implementation there is not native and is very slow. I suggest reading over http://saucelabs.com/resources/selenium/css-selectors for a brief look at some examples and also maybe have aread of http://saucelabs.com/resources/selenium/selenium-xpath-marks-the-spot in order to see some of the negatives of using xpath.
Use the below xpaths to detect 'About Us'link in your web page
Below xpath was written by refering the immediate parent node
//li[#class='expanded']/child::span[text()='About Us']
This xpath was written by using the parent node of Menu bar(parent of whole menu items)
//ul[#class='menu hdfc-investor']/child::li[contains(.,'About Us')]