Selenium WebDriver : Working with Drop-down Options

So, by now you must have learnt about how to open a Web Page, Navigate to another page by clicking on a link, click a button or verify text present on the Web Page. If not, you need to practice these basic User Actions that can be performed through Automation. You can also check the videos which explains about the different things that we have already discussed and will be discussing in the upcoming posts, related to Test Automation using Selenium WebDriver.

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In this post we are going to learn yet another important feature of Selenium WebDriver, that is Selecting one of the Drop-down Options.

Before we see how to use the methods provided by Selenium WebDriver to select Drop-down Options, we need to initialize the Object which we will be using to Select options. Following line of code will find the <select> tag in HTML source code, and assign it to an object which we can use to call different methods :

Select option = new Select(driver.findElement("<select> tag locator"));

Once we have initialized the Object, we are ready to use the Object to call different methods.


There are different ways of selecting Drop-down option, let's see them one by one :

1 - Select By Visible Text :

You can select options based on the values displayed in the drop-down list.

option.selectByVisibleText("Option text String");

This will select the option based on the String passed as parameter to above mentioned method.

2 - Select by Value :

option.selectByValue("Option value attribute");

You can find the value attribute of the <option> tag in the HTML source code.

  

3 - Select by Index :

option.selectByIndex(index);

index is 0-based (starts from zero), to be incremented by one for next option.

In this way we can Select any of the Drop-down options using any of the methods provided by Selenium WebDriver.

Feel free to comment in the comments section in case you have any queries.

Happy Learning.

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Selenium WebDriver : Getting text from Web Page

If you want to get some text (full / partial) that is displayed on Web Page, for verification, data extraction or any other purpose, we have some WebDriver methods that will do the job for us. Users with basic Object-Oriented knowledge can easily use these methods to achieve what is required.

In Types of Locators, we have seen different techniques to locate Web Page elements that are required to be found during Test Automation. It includes finding by ID, ClassName, Tag, LinkText, etc. that can be achieved by using appropriate Selenium WebDriver methods using the WebDriver Object instance.

In this post, we are going to see the way of extracting text from Web Page using Selenium WebDriver. Trust me it is as simple as one line of code.
Check the following code snippet :

public class Sample {
public static void main(String[] args) {
//Initialize Browser
System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "E:\\AllJARS\\Selenium_Driver_Servers\\geckodriver.exe");
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
driver.manage().window().maximize();
driver.get("https://www.google.com/");

//Find element
WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("a[href='https://mail.google.com/mail/?tab=wm']"));

//Get Text
System.out.println(element.getText());
}
}

The above code snippet navigates to Google, finds link (Gmail), extracts the text (Gmail) and prints it on console.

getText() method is used to extract the text from the Web Page element found using one of the locating techniques.
In this way we can find the required element and get or extract the required text from the Web Page. Further, we can use any substring() method provided by Java to get the desired String value (reduced length compared to Original String).

element.getText();

So, the above line of code can be used to extract the text from Web Page as required. Simple, isn't it ?

Hope you liked this post. In case of any queries or suggestions, feel free to comment in comments section.

Thank you for reading.

Happy Learning.

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Selenium - Types Of Locators

In this post, lets discuss about various types of Locators available to locate Web Page Elements.
This is the most crucial part of automation since we start automating after locating required elements on the Web Page !!

Before trying out any of the examples below, make sure that you have JAVA and Eclipse installed on your machine.
Also download Selenium JARS (Click here)

Different Types of Locators include :

• ID
• Class Name
• CSS
• LinkText
• Tag Name
• Xpath
• Name

These are the different methods used to locate Web Page elements.

Lets discuss each of them.

1 - Locating By ID :

          This is the first type of locator that we must use to locate an element (if ID of the required element exist). Since IDs are unique, we can find the required element easily by specifying its ID.

Example : 

          <input id = "email" class = "required" type = "text" />

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("email"));

If there is no ID for some particular desired element than we have to use other methods of locating elements.

2 - Locating By Class Name :

          Since multiple elements can belong to the same class, we have to ensure that the required element is located when using this method of locating elements. This is mostly used in conjunction with CSS for locating the right element. By default, it will return the first match it finds on the page.

Example : 

          <input id = "email" class = "required" type = "text" />

WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.className("required"));

In this example, it finds the above tag but on actual sites you have to make sure that right element is found.

3 - Locating By CSS :
          This makes use of the DOM structure of the page and includes various combinations of other locators. Hence we will discuss about CSS method of locating elements in the next post.

4 - Locating By LinkText :
          This is used only when we want to find an element which is a link. We find it using the text of the link.
Example :
          <a href = "https://google.co.in"> Google </a>
Webelement element = driver.findElement(By.linkText("Google"));

This way we can find the link that is displayed with the required text that we want to find. The element is found only when the link with desired text is present on the page.

5 - Locating By Tag Name :
          Another way of locating element is by using the tag name of the element. But like class names, we can have the same tag appear multiple times on the page. So care must be taken while using this approach.
Example :
          <p> This is a para </p>
WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.tagName("p"));

Again, make sure that the right element is found.

6 - Locating By Name :
          This makes use of the name attribute of the element to be found.
Example :
          <div id="pancakes">
                <button type="button" name="pancake" value="Blueberry">Blueberry</button>
                <button type="button" name="pancake" value="Banana">Banana</button>
                <button type="button" name="pancake" value="Strawberry">Strawberry</button>
          </div>
WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.name("pancake"));

7 - Locating By Xpath :
          It is useful in case of cross browser testing since different browsers render CSS in different ways, hence using CSS selectors to locate elements would behave differently on different browsers.
To find Xpath - Right Click on the element and select "Copy Xpath".

To conclude, we have seen different types of locators that can be used to locate elements on a web page. The best way is to use ID or name of the element if they exist.

Will discuss about setting up of the project in Eclipse (integrating Selenium JARS) and CSS Selectors method of locating element in the upcoming post.
Happy Learning.

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