Best way to find the type of the object locator by passing the object locator alone in Selenium Webdriver - selenium

Question

Is their any way to find the object locator type, by passing the object locator alone.
for e.g. i need to click on a login button, where its id=login, classname=loginbutton or xpath=//input[#name='login']. I need to build method where i will be just passing the objectlocator (either id or name) as the input and its type(either id or name) should be decided in the method like if it contains // then type should be of xpath etc.
I need to pass the objectLocator() which returns type to the findElement()
WebElement element = driver.findElement(objectLocator());

Answer 1

I do not think it is available off the shelf, you would have to implement your own logic.
The only thing is, let's say you want to search by linktext. As per your usecase, you would, in your object repo specify, "this is my linktext".
Now how do you know it is an id or a name or a linktext?
For xpath you can check if it starts with /, then its an xpath. If its only id or name then you can use ByIdorName, but i think it would become tricky with css and linktext.
The one thing I can think is you can establish some sort of conventions like if it is linktext precede your lcoator definition with linktext=blah blah and then you split and consume it.

Answer 2

I find it very useful to store all my locators as By objects and either use the By directly or pass the By into methods as I need them. For example:
By passwordField= By.id("login");
By userNameField = By.name("username");
By submitButton = By.xpath("\\myxpath\div[2]");
public void clickLogin() {
driver.findElement(submitButton).click();
}
I also use static Bys from other classes as well:
public void clickLogin() {
driver.findElement(LoginPage.SUBMIT_BUTTON).click();
}

Answer 3

The modern way to do this is using PageFactory and PageObjects
The following is a quick and dirty which will adapt selenium locators strings to WebDriver locators.
public enum LocatorType {
CLASSNAME, CSS, ID, LINK, NAME, TAGNAME, XPATH ;
}
public WebElement objectLocator(LocatorType type, String ref) {
switch(type) {
case ID:
return this.webDriver.findElement(By.id(ref));
case CLASSNAME:
return this.webDriver.findElement(By.className(ref));
case XPATH:
return this.webDriver.findElement(By.xpath(ref));
case CSS:
return this.webDriver.findElement(By.cssSelector(ref));
case LINK:
return this.webDriver.findElement(By.linkText(ref));
case NAME:
return this.webDriver.findElement(By.name(ref));
case TAGNAME:
return this.webDriver.findElement(By.tagName(ref));
}
return null;
}
public WebElement objectLocator(String identifier) {
String typeString = identifier.substring(0, identifier.indexOf('='));
String ref = identifier.substring(identifier.indexOf('=')+1, identifier.length());
if (typeString.toLowerCase().contains("classname")) {
return objectLocator(LocatorType.CLASSNAME, ref);
} else if (typeString.toLowerCase().contains("css")) {
return objectLocator(LocatorType.CSS, ref);
} else if (typeString.toLowerCase().contains("id")) {
return objectLocator(LocatorType.ID, ref);
} else if (typeString.toLowerCase().contains("link")) {
return objectLocator(LocatorType.LINK, ref);
} else if (typeString.toLowerCase().contains("name")) {
return objectLocator(LocatorType.NAME, ref);
} else if (typeString.toLowerCase().contains("tagname")) {
return objectLocator(LocatorType.TAGNAME, ref);
} else if (typeString.toLowerCase().contains("xpath")) {
return objectLocator(LocatorType.XPATH, ref);
} else {
return null;
}
}

Answer 4

It looks like you are looking for this solution because you have an object repository maintained somewhere outside of your code in some kind of properties file or xml.
Using gui maps has lot of disadvantages like,
- maintain an external file with a list of locators
- parse locator files to read keys (you can abstract this but still an overhead)
- when writing PageObjects you need to switch back and forth from Page to gui map
- possibility of multiple duplicate locators in gui maps
- object repo grows over time and becomes impossible to maintain
- debugging is far more difficult
What you are looking for is adding one more layer of complexity which is not required in my opinion. Automating browsers is a challenge in itself and writing maintainable test automation code is utmost important.
Use PageFactory in your page objects.
- Natural place for your locators are Page Objects themselves.
- Locators easily accessible in page objects for review or correction
- No need for explicit driver.findElement, with #FindBy you get that for free
- modern Java and awesome annotations make page objects look beautiful & readable
I have used gui maps before and struggled a lot. Switching to page factory made me realize that using object repository was such a bad idea!

Answer 5

This should do for locating element. I have given example till 3 level deep.
public WebElement findElement(String locator){
WebElement w = null;
try{
return (driver.findElement(By.id(locator)));
}catch(Exception e1){
try{
return ( driver.findElement(By.name(locator)));
}catch(Exception e2){
try{
return (driver.findElement(By.xpath(locator)));
}catch(Exception e3){
System.out.println("Cound not find a locator");
e3.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
return(w);
}
public void type(String locator, String value){
try{
WebElement w= findElement(locator);
w.sendKeys(""+value);
Thread.sleep(sleepTime);
}catch(Exception e){
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
-Vinay