Locating GUI Elements in selenium WebDriver

Locating GUI Elements

Locating elements in WebDriver is done by using the "findElement(By.locator())" method. The "locator" part of the code is same as any of the locators previously discussed in the Selenium IDE chapters of these tutorials. Infact, it is recommended that you locate GUI elements using IDE and once successfully identified export the code to webdriver.

Here is a sample code that locates an element by its id. Facebook is used as the Base URL.

package newproject;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;

import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;

public class PG2 {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

                System.setProperty("webdriver.firefox.marionette","C:\\geckodriver.exe");

                WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

        String baseUrl = "http://www.facebook.com";

        String tagName = "";

       

        driver.get(baseUrl);

        tagName = driver.findElement(By.id("email")).getTagName();

        System.out.println(tagName);

        driver.close();

        System.exit(0);

}

}

We used the getTagName() method to extract the tag name of that particular element whose id is "email". When run, this code should be able to correctly identify the tag name "input" and will print it out on Eclipse's Console window.

Summary for locating elements

Variation	Description	Sample
By.className	finds elements based on the value of the "class" attribute	findElement(By.className("someClassName"))
By.cssSelector	finds elements based on the driver's underlying CSS Selector engine	findElement(By.cssSelector("input#email"))
By.id	locates elements by the value of their "id" attribute	findElement(By.id("someId"))
By.linkText	finds a link element by the exact text it displays	findElement(By.linkText("REGISTRATION"))
By.name	locates elements by the value of the "name" attribute	findElement(By.name("someName"))
By.partialLinkText	locates elements that contain the given link text	findElement(By.partialLinkText("REG"))
By.tagName	locates elements by their tag name	findElement(By.tagName("div"))
By.xpath	locates elements via XPath	findElement(By.xpath("//html/body/div/table/tbody/tr/td[2]/table/tbody/tr[4]/td/table/tbody/tr/td[2]/table/tbody/tr[2]/td[3]/ form/table/tbody/tr[5]"))