How to write a custom FindElement routine in Selenium? - selenium

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to write a custom FindElement routine in Selenium 2.0 WebDriver. The idea would be something like this:
driver.FindElement(By.Method( (ISearchContext) => {
/* examine search context logic here... */ }));
The anonymous method would examine the ISearchContext and return True if it matches; False otherwise.
I'm digging through the Selenium code, and getting a bit lost. It looks like the actual By.* logic is carried out server-side, not client side. That seems to be complicating matters.
Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I do a multi-staged search. I have a method that performs a try catch and then a method that gets the element. In theory you could do a try catch until instead of this way but I like this way better because of my setup.
public bool CheckUntil(IWebDriver driver, string selectorType, string selectorInfo)
{
int Timer = 160;
bool itemFound = false;
for (int i = 0; i < Timer; i++)
if(itemFound)
{
i = 0
}
else
{
Thread.Sleep(500);
if(selectorType.ToLower() == "id" && TryCatch(driver, selectorType, selectorInfo))
{
if(driver.FindElement(By.Id(selectorInfo).Displayed)
{
itemFound = true;
}
}
else if(selectorType.ToLower() == "tagname" && TryCatch(driver, selectorType, selectorInfo))
{
if(driver.FindElement(By.TagName(selectorInfo).Displayed)
{
itemFound = true;
}
}
}
return itemFound;
}
Here's my try catch method you can add as many different types as you want id, cssselector, xpath, tagname, classname, etc.
public bool TryCatch(IWebDriver driver, string selectorType, string selectorInfo)
{
bool ElementFound = false;
try
{
switch(selectorType)
{
case "id":
driver.FindElement(By.Id(selectorInfo);
break;
case "tagname":
driver.FindElement(By.TagName(selectorInfo);
break;
}
ElementFound = truel
}
catch
{
ElementFound = false;
}
return ElementFound;
}

Answer 2

Ok, I figured out how to do this. I'm leveraging driver.ExecuteScript() to run custom js on the webdriver. It looks a bit like this:
function elementFound(elem) {
var nodeType = navigator.appName == ""Microsoft Internet
Explorer"" ? document.ELEMENT_NODE : Node.ELEMENT_NODE;
if(elem.nodeType == nodeType)
{
/* Element identification logic here */
}
else { return false; }
}
function traverseElement(elem) {
if (elementFound(elem) == true) {
return elem;
}
else {
for (var i = 0; i < elem.childNodes.length; i++) {
var ret = traverseElement(elem.childNodes[i]);
if(ret != null) { return ret; }
}
}
}
return traverseElement(document);