Need help finding an element in selenium - xpath

Can some one help me to locate an element (without using xpath) which is displayed using : <i id="ext-gen759" class="icon-tool"></i> under a <div> tag. The HTML is as follows:
<div id="ext-comp-1089" class=" MiniTbar">
<a href="javascript:void(0);" id="ext-gen760" class=" active">
<i id="ext-gen759" class="icon-tool"></i> -->> need to locate this.
</a>
</div>
I don't want to use:
By.Id --> id is dynamic
By.XPath --> not stable
I have tried the following without getting a result:
By.className("icon-tool") -- > not working
By.partialLinkText("icon-tool") --> not working
Any solution?

You can rely on the part of the id using, for example, starts-with():
//div[starts-with(#id, "ext-comp-")]/a[starts-with(#id, "ext-gen")]/i[#class="icon-tool"]
Or a CSS selector:
div[id^=ext-comp-] a.active[id^=ext-gen] i.icon-tool[id^=ext-gen]

using xpath should do this. You may need to make sure that's the only element i with same criteria on the page
//i[contains(#id,'ext-gen')]

Give a chance to the find element by css selector ?
driver.find_element_by_css_selector('i.icon-tool')
The python documentation is here http://selenium-python.readthedocs.org/en/latest/locating-elements.html

You can find it using css selector:
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("i[class='icon-tool']"));

Related

How to iterate over a list and create hyperlinks based on the text in thymeleaf?

I am developing a food website using Spring boot, Thymleaf and Bootstrap. I need to display menu items in a webpage. To display it I am fetching the data from a database and then iterating over it to display. However, I am not able to display it in a single column like this. Any suggestions on how to handle this?
Code:
${menu.mainMenuName}"
You need to move your "th:each" statement to the div tag. It will be something like:
<div th:each="menu: ${mainMenu}" class="col-md-12">
<a class="text-info" th:value="${menu.id}" th:text="${menu.mainMenuName}" href=""></a>
</div>
Note that ${menu.mainMenuName}" is redundant with th:text="${menu.mainMenuName}
I found the solution for it. Problem with my previous approach was it was creating col-md-2 for every link hence it was getting displayed in single line to fix it below approach was followed:
<div class="col-md-2">
<div class="main-menu" th:each="menu: ${mainMenu}">
<a class="text-info" th:value="${menu.id}" th:text="${menu.mainMenuName}" href=""></a>
</div>
</div>

How to click a link using XPath and Selenium IDE

I’m new to both XPath and Selenium. I have a need to be able to click a link with Selenium based on whether or not a span is as a certain text. The example code is:
<div>
<span>Fri</span>
<ul>
<li>
<a href=#></a>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<span>Sat</span>
<ul>
<li>
<a href=#></a>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
My XPath expression is //*[text()[contains(.,'Fri')]] which finds the correct span. Now I thought I could use //*[text()[contains(.,'Fri')]]../ul/li/a, but that doesn't work.
How can I do it?
The Selenium IDE command will be:
command: click
target : //span[contains(text(),'Fri')]/following::a
From here:
following:: All nodes that are after the context node in the tree,
excluding any descendants, attribute nodes, and namespace nodes.
Notice, that you may not write [1] at the end of the XPath expression to select the first node from all occurrences as the Selenium IDE does it by default.
As you use the IDE you can also use easier to read CSS selector:
command: click
target : css=span:contains('Fri')+ul a
As for your initial XPath expression, you missed one slash before ../:
//*[text()[contains(.,'Fri')]]/../ul/li/a

discover a certain part of a page with selenium

I have a webpage looks something like this:
<html>
...
<div id="menu">
...
<ul id="listOfItems">
<!--- repeated block start -->
<li id="item" class="itemClass">
...
<span class="spanClass"><span class="title">title</span></span>
...
</li>
<!-- repeated block end-->
<li id="item" class="itemClass">
...
<span class="spanClass"><span class="title">title something</span></span>
...
</li>
<li id="item" class="itemClass">
...
<span class="spanClass"><span class="title">title other thing</span></span>
...
</li>
</ul>
...
</div>
...
</html>
I would like to know what is the xpath of the titles ("title", "title something", "title other thing"). The point is that the order of the <li> elements are not specified. It could be different after every page loading. Is there any method how to discover a certain structure of the page with xpath? I have an notion about how to solve this issue, but before I'm going to write iterations with C# to discover the page I ask you.
Thanks in advance!
First of all, id's should be unique, so your portrayed webpage would not work well when it comes to testing.
I did however test, and got some XPath locators to work for selecting specific titles (although I recommend you fix your webpage instead of actually using this):
//li[#id='item']/span/span
//li[#id='item'][1]/span/span
//li[#id='item'][3]/span/span
If you're after all three titles, you could try Dimitre Novatchev's suggestion:
//span[#class='title']
This should get all titles on the page.
I would like to say one thing however, if you're getting into Selenium, I recommend you download the Selenium IDE extension for Firefox. It's a great tool for beginners. It helps you both to make your Selenium tests by recording your clicks on a website, and it also helps you auto-generate and test your XPath locators and other locators.
And again: I urge you to not make a website with duplicate id elements :-)
Does Selenium support XPath expressions like:
//span[#class='title']
If yes, than use the above XPath expression. It selects every span element in the XML document, whose class attribute has string value of "title".
I recommend to use a tool like the XPath Visualizer to play with different XPath expressions and see the selected nodes highlighted in the source XML document.

Trying to create XPath from this HTML snippet

I have played for a while writing XPath but am unable to come up with exactly what I want.
I'm trying to write XPath for link(click1 and click2 in code snippet below) based on known text(myidentity in code snippet below). Can someone take a look into and suggest possible solution?
HTML code snippet:
<div class="abc">
<a onclick="mycontroller.goto('xx','yy'); return false;" href="#">
<img src="images/controls/inheritance.gif"/>
</a>
myidentity
<span>
<a onclick="mycontroller.goto('xx','yy'); return false;" href="#">click1</a>
<a onclick="mycontroller.goto('xx','yy'); return false;" href="#">click2</a>
</span>
</div>
You don't need to use XPath here, you could use a CSS locator. These are often faster and more compatible across different browsers.
css=div:contains(myidentity) > span a:nth-child(1) //click1
css=div:contains(myidentity) > span a:nth-child(2) //click2
Note that the > is only required to workaround a bug in the CSS locator library used by Selenium.
Hard to say without seeing the rest of the HTML but the following should work:
//div[text()[contains(., "myidentity")]]/span/a
See Macro's answer - this form should be used.
//div[text()[contains(., "myidentity")]]/span/a[2]
The following only works with one section of text in the containing div.
You'll need to select based on the text containing your identity text.
Xpath for click1
//div[contains(text(),"myidentity")]/span/a[1]
Xpath for click2
//div[contains(text(),"myidentity")]/span/a[2]

Writing XPath for elements which have no ID or Name in Selenium

I'm trying to automate testing of the code... well, written without testing in mind (no IDs on many elements, and a lot of elements with the same class names). I would appreciate any help (questions are below the code):
<div id="author-taxonomies" class="menu-opened menu-hover-opened-inactive" onmouseover="styleMenuElement(this)" onmouseout="styleMenuElement(this)" onclick="toggleSFGroup(this)">Author</div>
<div id="author-taxonomies-div" class="opened">
<div id="top-level-menu" class="opened">
<div id="top-level-menu-item-1" class="as-master">
<div class="filter-label"> Name</div>
</div>
<div id="top-level-menu-item-1" class="as-slave"
style="top: 525px; left: 34px; z-index: 100; display: none;"> </div>
<div id="top-level-menu-item-2" class="as-master">
<div class="filter-label">Title</div>
</div>
<div id="top-level-menu-item-2" class="as-slave">
<div id="top-level-menu-item-2" class="as-slave-title as-slave-title-subgroup"
>Title</div>
<div id="top-level-menu-item-2" class="as-slave-body"> </div>
<div class="as-slave-buffer"> </div>
</div>
<div id="top-level-menu-item-3" class="as-master">
<div class="filter-label">Location</div>
</div>
<div id="top-level-menu-item-3" class="as-slave"> </div>
</div>
</div>
The question is: how to refer particular labels of this menu and the properties with xPath expressions? For example, if I want to:
verify the "Location" label is there
check if "Title" with class "as-slave" is not visible at the moment
It would be something similar to:
//div[#id="top-level-menu-item-3"]/div[#class="filter-label"]
//div[#id="top-level-menu1"] --- and check in code for display: none ... assuming it is selenium rc you are using
Update: also be sure to install the following firefox addin, it is Really useful when trying different xpath expressions on a site https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1095
As a side note: try to avoid using xpath locators in Selenium, if possible. If you have a long xpath expression, it can be up to 20 times slower for Selenium to find the element compared to identifying it using its unique ID. Of course, sometimes there is no alternative to using xpath. However, when you do use it, keep '//' expressions to minimum - this is a real performance killer.
If you're just starting with Selenium, download the selenium add-on for Firefox. As you click on DOM elements, Selenium shows you the xpath to access it.
I am currently working on an open source library for generating xpath expressions through a fluent .Net API. The idea is to be able to generate xpath based selenium locators without having to know xpath.
Here's an example of how the library can be used in your case:
XPathFinder.Find.Tag("div").With.Attribute("id", "top-level-menu-item-3").And.Child("div").With.Attribute("class", "filter-label").ToXPathExpression();
This will produce the following xpath:
"//div[#id='top-level-menu-item-3']/div[#class='filter-label']"
Check it out at
http://code.google.com/p/xpathitup/
You can use firepath that can be installed over firebug(both firefox plugin). When you get a xpath, dont forget to append // before using it. Either in code or in selenium IDE. You are not appending it thats why its unusable. There are two types of xpath absolute and relative. If you use absolute then it will take care of dynamic ids. But if you use relative it will break with each run.

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