Locators in selenium webdriver

Lets understand locators by asking WH questions.

Click on the image to enlarge it

What are locators ?

1. Locators are the lifeblood of the tests.
2. Locators are different strategies for locating elements on a page
3. Locator can be termed as an address that identifies a web element uniquely within the webpage.
4. Locators are the HTML properties of a web element. 

When and Why they are required ? 

1. To tell the Selenium about the web element it need to perform action on
2. To tell Selenium which GUI elements ( say Text Box, Buttons, Check Boxes etc) its needs to operate on.
3. To get information of an element

Who are they ?

• Id 
• Name
• Linktext
• Partial Linktext
• Tag Name
• Class name
• Css selectors
• selectors are patterns used to select the element(s) you want to style
• is the part of a CSS rule set that actually selects the content you want to style 
• XPath expression
• document is parsed into a tree structure (DOM tree)
• for selecting nodes from a document
• is used to navigate through elements and attributes in a document.

Where are they in selenium web driver? 

• abstract class By inside the package org.openqa.selenium
• subclasses of By and interfaces

How to use locators, to find elements with different locator strategies ? 

• Using developer tools available in browsers
• Right-click --> Inspect Element or Inspect (Firefox / Crome)
• Using browser add-on like this 
• Example: 
• <input name="register" class="required" type="text"/>
• WebElement register= driver.findElement(By.name("register"));

 Which locator strategy to use?

• There is no perfect locator
• If you’re smart about your locators you can reduce the cost of maintenance

References

1. http://selenium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/docs/api/java/org/openqa/selenium/By.html
2. http://www.seleniumeasy.com/selenium-tutorials/selenium-locators
3. http://toolsqa.com/selenium-webdriver/locators/
4. http://www.guru99.com/locators-in-selenium-ide.html

Follow me on