selenium span link li not working - selenium

Question

I am new to selenium. I am practicing to write a test case on http://www.countdown.tfl.gov.uk. Below are the steps I followed:
a) I opened the browser to selenium Web Driver
b) Found the search text Box and enter H32 and clicked on search button to selenium.
Till this part it works fine.
Now on the page I am actually getting two records on the left side of the page under the search. I am actually trying to click on the first one i.e. "Towards Southall,Townhall" link. Nothing is happening.
Below is my code:
public class CountdownTest {
#Test
public void tflpageOpen(){
WebDriver driver = openWebDriver();
searchforBus(driver,"H32");
selectrouteDirection(driver)
}
//open the countdowntfl page
private WebDriver openWebDriver(){
WebDriver driver = WebDriverFactory.getWebDriver("FireFox");
driver.get("http://www.countdown.tfl.gov.uk");
return driver;
}
private void searchforBus(WebDriver driver,String search){
WebElement searchBox = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[#id='initialSearchField']"));
searchBox.sendKeys(search);
WebElement searchButton = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//button[#id='ext-gen35']"));
searchButton.click();
}
private void selectrouteDirection(WebDriver driver){
WebElement towardssouthallLink= driver.findElement(By.xpath("//span[#id='ext-gen165']']"));
((WebElement) towardssouthallLink).click();
}
}
Please help me.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Since you are getting NoSuchElement Exception now, you may try the following code with the usage of WebDriver explicit wait.
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 15);
WebElement towardssouthallLink = wait.until(ExpectedConditions.presenceOfElementLocated(By.xpath("(//*[#id='route-search']//li/span)[1]")));
towardssouthallLink.click();
Or WebDriver implicit wait
WebDriver driver = WebDriverFactory.getWebDriver("FireFox");
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(15, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
driver.get("http://www.countdown.tfl.gov.uk");
Tips:
The search results need some time to be retrieved, so please use Explicit wait or Implicit wait.
Don't use locators like span[#id='ext-gen165'], they are ExtJs auto generated.
In this case, css selector can also be used: #route-search li:nth-of-type(1) > span

Answer 2

You aren't calling selectrouteDirection.
You probably want:
#Test
public void tflpageOpen(){
WebDriver driver = openWebDriver();
searchforBus(driver,"H32");
selectrouteDirection(driver);
}
You also don't need to cast here:
((WebElement) towardssouthallLink).click();
It's already a WebElement anyway.

Answer 3

I found that id for those links are dynamically generated. ids are of the form 'ext-genXXX' where XXX is number which is dynamically generated hence varies each time.
Actually, you should try with linkText:
For 'Towards Southall, Town Hall'
driver.findElement(By.linkText("Towards Southall, Town Hall")).click
For 'Towards Hounslow, Bus Station'
driver.findElement(By.linkText("Towards Hounslow, Bus Station")).click
Here is a logic:
Get all elements which have id starts with 'ext-gen' & iterate over it & click on link with matching text. Following is Ruby code(sorry, I don't know Java well):
links = driver.find_elements(:xpath, "//span[starts-with(#id, 'ext-gen')]")
links.each do |link|
if link.text == "Towards Southall, Town Hall"
link.click
break
end
end