I'm trying to find the most reliable way to determine which element in a resource a given search parameter refers to. So far I process the xpath expression and hope to find a match, but this seems hacky.
Is there a standard or more consistent way to determine what element(s) within a resource a search parameter should use?
Not right now - parsing the XPath is it. This is an active point of discussion in the standards group and will probably result in some modification to the SearchParameter resource (I hope!).
Related
Normally, one would use an XPath query to obtain a certain value or node. In my case, I'm doing some web-scraping with google spreadsheets, using the importXML function to update automatically some values. Two examples are given below:
=importxml("http://www.creditagricoledtvm.com.br/";"(//td[#class='xl7825385'])[9]")
=importxml("http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/ELIPCAM:BZ";"(//span)[32]")
The problem is that the pages I'm scraping will change every now and then and I understand very little about XML/XPath, so it takes a lot of trial and error to get to a node. I was wondering if there is any tool I could use to point to an element (either in the page or in its code) that would provide an appropriate query.
For example, in the second case, I've noticed the info I wanted was in a span node (hence (//span)), so I printed all of them in a spreadsheet and used the line count to find the [32] index. This takes long to load, so it's pretty inconvenient. Also, I don't even remember how I've figured the //td[#class='xl7825385'] query. Thus why I'm wondering if there is more practical method of pointing to page elements.
Some clues :
Learning XPath basics is still useful. W3Schools is a good starting point.
https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xpath_intro.asp
Otherwise, built-in dev tools of your browser can help you to generate absolute XPath. Select an element, right-click on it then >Copy>Copy XPath.
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/open
Browser extensions like Chropath can generate absolute or relative XPath for you.
https://autonomiq.io/chropath/
I am recently brushing up my skills in TOSCA, I was working on it 2 years ago and switched to Selenium, I noticed that the new TOSCA allows identification using Xpath, and I am really familiar with it now, however, I cannot make it work in TOSCA and I am sure the object identification works because I am testing my xpath in google chrome developer tools.
Something as simple as (//*[text()='Forgot Password?'])[1] does not seem to be working. Could I be missing something?
This is the webpage I am using as reference for this example:
https://www.freecrm.com/index.html
XPath certainly can be used to identify elements of an HTML web UI in Tosca.
Since the question was originally posted, the "Forgot Password?" link at https://www.freecrm.com/index.html appears to have changed so that it's text is now "Forgot your password?" and is actually located at https://ui.freecrm.com/.
To account for that change, this answer uses "(//*[text()='Forgot your password?'])[1]" instead of the expression provided in the original post.
With the text modification, the expression works to idenfity the element in XScan after wrapping it in double quotes:
"(//*[text()='Forgot your password?'])[1]"
Some things to keep in mind when using XPath in Tosca:
It seems that XPath expressions need to be wrapped in double quotes (") so that XScan knows when to start evaluating XPath instead of using its normal rules. Looking closely at the expression that is pregenerated when XScan starts, we see that it is wrapped in double quotes:
"id('ui')/div[1]/div[1]/div[1]/a[1]"
A valid XPath expression doesn't necessarily guarantee uniqueness, so it is helpful to pay attention to any feedback messages at the bottom of XScan. There is a significant difference between "The selected element was not found" and "The selected element is not unique". The former simply indicates XScan can't find a match, the latter indicates that XScan matches successfully, but cannot uniquely identify the element.
My experience has been that it helps to explicitly identify the element to reduce the possibility of ambiguity. If the idea is to target the anchor element in order for tests to click a link, then reducing scope from any element i.e. "(//*[text()='Forgot your Password?'])[1]" to only match anchor elements with that text "//a[text()='Forgot your password?']".
In general, Tricentis (or at least the trainers with whom I have spoken) recommends using methods other than XPath to identify a target if they are available. That said, in my experience I've had better luck with XPath than with "Identify by Anchor".
An XPath expression is visible and editable in the XModuleAttribute properties without having to rescan. Personally, I find it easier to work with than the XML value of the RelativeId property that is generated when using Identify by Anchor.
With Anchor, I've had issues where XModuleAttributes scanned in one browser can no longer be found when switching to another browser, specifically from IE to Chrome. With XPath, I've not had these issues.
While XPath works well to identify the properties of one element with attributes of another because it can identify the relationship between them (very common with controls in Angular applications), the same can often be accomplished by adapting the engine layer using the TBox API (i.e. building a custom control). This requires some initial work up front from developer resources, but it can significantly improve how tests steer these controls in addition to reducing the need for Automation Specialists to have to rely on XPath.
What I know is that you can identify elements with XPath when working with XML messages in Tosca API testing. Your use case seems to be UI testing, but I am not sure about that.
Did you try to use XScan to scan the page? Usually Tosca automatically calculates an XPath expression for you that you can use immediately.
Please see the manual for details.
If it still does not work please try to be more specific? What isn't working? Error message? Unexpected behavior? ...
Tosca provides its set of attributes for locating any type of elements. You can directly select any number of attributes you want to make your element unique along with index of that element. Just make sure that you are not using any dynamic values in 'id' or 'class-name' of that element, also the index range is not so large like 20 out of 100; it could be 5 out of 10, which will be helpful if you need to update it in future.
Also take help of parent elements which will be uniquely located easily and then locate your expected element.
TOSCA provide various ways to locate an element just like selenium plus in addition it will provide other properties also.Under transition properties you will find x path and it will be absolute x path since you know selenium you know the difference between absolute and relative x path. I would suggest you to go with.
1.Identify by ID OR name
2. Identify by anchor
if your relative x path is not working
Try load all properties on the right side bottom. But it showed for me without clicking on it. See here
I'm currently trying to figure out how to shorten my extremely long xpath.
//div[#class='m_set_part'][1]/div/div[2]/div[#class='row']/div[#class='col details detail-head']/div[#class='detail-body']/div[2]/div/div[#class='size']/div/div[#class='m_product_finder_size']/ul/li[1]/span[#class='size-btn']/a
This is the one I have right now and it's way too long, the problem is I need the first node to differentiate between products. Is there a way to shorten it like
//div[#class='m_set_part']/*/span[#class='size-btn']/a
Or do I have to go through all childnodes to reach the last nodes?
Link
I want to find the for each product the sizebuttons. The only way to differentiate them, I guess, is via adding a [1] or [2] to the m_set_part node.
You are basically correct. As said in the comments, you can use // to select descendant or self nodes. Hence, this will give you all the size links:
//span[#class='size-btn']/a
As you suggest, you can select the specific product using a positional predicate. However, if you prefer you could also use another detail, e.g. the name. This would simply be
//div[#class="m_set_part"][.//label="Vælg"]
to given you the Vælg product.
Now combine them both and you can get the size link for this specifc product using
//div[#class="m_set_part"][.//label="Vælg"]//span[#class='size-btn']/a
or using the psoitional predicate it would be
//div[#class="m_set_part"][1]//span[#class='size-btn']/a
Also, please make sure you use a proper namespace as this is an actual XHTML document. One other thing is that you might prefer to use contains(#class, 'm_set_part') instead of #class="m_set_part" and the like, because the query will still work even if the add new CSS classes to this element.
To answer to your question: No you don't have to go through all nodes.
You may use the // descendant-or-self selector to 'skip' zero or more nodes in between the preceeding and the next part of the expression. So //div[#class='m_set_part']//span[#class='size-btn']/a might give you exactly what you want. * on the other hand matches any node, but exactly one node. Therfore
//div[#class='m_set_part'][1]/*/*[2]/*[#class='row']/*[#class='col details detail-head']/*[#class='detail-body']/*[2]/*/*[#class='size']/*/*[#class='m_product_finder_size']/*/*[1]/*[#class='size-btn']/a
is another way to shorten your original expression. Whether it's still returns only the interested node or more is solely depends on the document you apply the expression on.
I Have two objects in same page but with different locations(tabs), I want to verify those objects each a part ...
i cant uniquely any of objects because the have same properties.
These objects clearly are unique to a point because they have completely different text, this means that you will be able to create an object to match only one of them. My suggestion would be to look for the object by using its text property, one of them will always have "Top Ranking" the other you wil need to turn into a regular expression for the text and will be something "Participants (\d+)".
I am assuming that this next answer is unlikely to be possible so saved it for after the answer you are likely to use but the best solution would of course be to get someone with access to give these elements ids for you to search for. This will in the long term be much easier for you to maintain and not using text will allow this test to run in any language.
Manaysah, do these objects have different indexes? Use the object spy and determine which index they have, the ordinal identifier index may be a solution to your problem. You could also try adding an innertext object property if possible, using a wildcard for the number inside the () as it appears dynamic.
try using xpath for the objects...xpath will definitely be different
I'm currently working with JMeter in order to stress test one of our systems before release. Through this, I need to simulate users clicking links on the webpage presented to them. I've decided to extract theese links with an XPath Post-Processor.
Here's my problem:
I have an a XPath expression that looks something like this:
//div[#data-attrib="foo"]//a//#href
However I need to extract a specific child for each thread (user). I want to do something like this:
//div[#data-attrib="foo"]//a[position()=n]//#href
(n being the current index)
My question:
Is there a way to make this query work, so that I'm able to extract a new index of the expression for each thread?
Also, as I mentioned, I'm using JMeter. JMeter creates a variable for each of the resulting nodes, of an XPath query. However it names them as "VarName_n", and doesn't store them as a traditional array. Does anyone know how I can dynamicaly pick one of theese variables, if possible? This would also solve my problem.
Thanks in advance :)
EDIT:
Nested variables are apparently not supported, so in order to dynamically refer to variables that are named "VarName_1", VarName_2" and so forth, this can be used:
${__BeanShell(vars.get("VarName_${n}"))}
Where "n" is an integer. So if n == 1, this will get the value of the variable named "VarName_1".
If the "n" integer changes during a single thread, the ForEach controller is designed specifically for this purpose.
For the first question -- use:
(//div[#data-attrib="foo"]//a)[position()=$n]/#href
where $n must be substituted with a specific integer.
Here we also assume that //div[#data-attrib="foo"] selects a single div element.
Do note that the XPath pseudo-operator // typically result in very slow evaluation (a complete sub-tree is searched) and also in other confusing problems ( this is why the brackets are needed in the above expression).
It is recommended to avoid using // whenever the structure of the document is known and a complete, concrete path can be specified.
As for the second question, it is not clear. Please, provide an example.