Selenium Api, Selenium locators and regex - selenium

Question

In my page I have some ids like "foo:searchResults12345" that are composed of a static part ("foo:searchResults" and a dynamic rendered one - one or more numbers.
I want to retrieve every id that contains the static part "foo:searchResults", ignoring the dynamic one.
I am thinking at using regex for the pattern text, but the problem is that I cannot find any method in Selenium Api to help me with this, such as selenium.getAllIdsInPage().
Anybody had the same problem and figured out a solution?

Answer 1

I would recommend combining getXpathCount with a loop to iterate through each match. For example the following xpath should return the total number of matching nodes when used with getXpathCount
//*[starts-with(#id, 'foo:searchResults')]
You should then be able to loop through each match using the following example XPath:
/descendant::*[starts-with(#id, 'foo:searchResults')][1]
Where 1 would be replaced by the current count in the loop.
Below is an example in Java that should print the matching IDs to system.out:
#Test
public void outputDynamicIds() {
selenium.open("http://www.example.com/");
int elementCount = selenium.getXpathCount("//*[starts-with(#id, 'foo:searchResults')]").intValue();
for (int i = 1; i < elementCount+1; i++) {
System.out.println(selenium.getAttribute("/descendant::*[starts-with(#id, 'foo:searchResults')][" + i + "]#id"));
}
}

Answer 2

Another way to go is to use a custom Location Strategy. I am doing this in my current project and it works fine.
In your particular case you can write a custom strategy that checks if the id attribute of each element starts with the locator string (the static part in your example) and return this element if that is so.
I think this approach is much cleaner.