Struggling to locate elements while using Selenium testing? Then you are still yet to discover all the advanced locator strategies and techniques that you can implement with this automation testing suite. The way you look at your elements will be the major differentiating factor when it comes to ensuring that your tests are robust, maintainable, and high-quality. Even if you are a new tester, who doesn’t even know what is Selenium WebDriver, you should have a common idea about these locator strategies.
Want to learn more? Don’t worry! We are here for you. Our article will help you understand a huge range of strategies and best practices for element location in Selenium. We will also go through some of the major challenges that you will encounter and techniques that will help you resolve them.
What Are Element Locators
Do you know what are element locators and how to use them? So, while you’re using the Selenium WebDriver, you have the responsibility of identifying an element on the web page before you can perform any action on it, like clicking, typing, or reading.
To perform this process, Selenium provides you various locators like ID, name, class name, tag name, link text, partial link text, CSS selectors, and XPath.
The above locator names make it clear that you can find the elements depending on various parameters. To implement a robust locator strategy, you must choose the right approach for the right situation, which will balance the readability, performance, stability, and maintainability of the overall testing infrastructure.
Locator Strategies For Selenium
Let us now divert our attention towards multiple locators that you can use with Selenium to find your elements during the automation testing process. While discussing these locators, we will take a detailed look about their use cases and how they can benefit you:
● Locating By ID
This is mostly considered as the most stable and most efficient way of finding elements with Selenium. Why? Well, when you are using the ID attributes within an HTML, in most cases, they will be unique to all the elements present on it.
So, if the developers use these attributes correctly, it will act as a single-digit reference to exactly one specific element. We also advise you to ensure that all changes to IDs are documented or captured in the code review process to prevent test breakage if you are using it for element location.
To help you understand further, the following code shows a basic implementation of this locator strategy:
● Locating By Name
Locating the elements on an application by their name is another straightforward way, especially when you’re working with multiple form fields. However, you must remember that the name attribute is often shared by multiple elements, especially if a page has repeated inputs or groups of radio buttons.
To further improve your understanding, the following code shows a basic implementation of this location strategy:
● Locating By Class Name
You can locate elements by the class name if they share certain styling or belong to the same component or widget. This approach is often visible in test automation code when you’re interacting with repeated elements like a list of items that carry the same class.
To help you properly understand the implementation of this locator strategy, we have given a sample code that uses it:
● Locating By Tag Name
You can locate elements by their tag name in certain specialized contexts where you might want to fetch all image elements on a page or count the number of table elements that may be present on the user interface.
Want to use this locator strategy? The following sample code will help you understand the implementation for this:
● Locating By Link Text And Partial Link Text
You can locate elements by the link text only using the anchor elements that contain the text you specify. Similarly, with partial link text, you can only work with a substring that matches to the link’s visible text.
To further help you understand the implementation, we have given an example code below:
● Locating By CSS Selector
CSS selectors are often considered as a very powerful and popular way to look at elements, especially in Selenium. If you are a front end developer, there is a high possibility that you have at least worked once with these selectors to style your elements.
To further help you with the implementation process for CSS selectors, we have attached a sample code for it below:
● Locating By XPath
Finally, you can use XML Path Language, that can navigate to the structure of a document to locate elements. It is an extremely powerful way as it can select elements depending on a huge range of criteria that can allow you to implement advanced queries which might not be available with CSS.
Want to learn more about the implementation of XPath locators? Just glance through the following example code snippet:
Additional Advanced Techniques
Other than the element locator strategies that we discussed above, we also advise the testers to add the following advanced techniques to further improve the element locator strategies while maintaining the quality of the application:
Using JavaScript For Complex Locators
In a very rare scenario, your application might read to run a JavaScript snippet so that it can grab an element that is inaccessible using normal means. Selenium will allow you to run this script directly if you use the following code that we have given:
Although it is a powerful way of finding the elements, we would like to remind you that this should be your last resort. Instead of implementing this method straight away, you should first try standard locators.
Common XPath Functions Or Axes
Xpath will support a wide range of axes which can be useful for advanced or unusual DOM structures. For example, by using these parameters, you can locate a label by the text and then get its adjacent input. Want to learn more about the implementation? The following code snippet will help you perform this process:
If you’re able to properly implement this entire workflow, you can massively reduce the guesswork when there is no stable ID or class available to find these elements on your application.
Combining Locators
Have you encountered a scenario when one locator isn’t enough to find your desired element? Well, we have a good news for you! Selenium allows you to find an element within another element. You can use this approach to refine the result from a broader locator.
Still confused? The following code snippet will help you refine your understanding about this approach:
It primarily allows you to narrow down the search scope to a specific section of the page and can make your code more readable. It will also have a very important role in reducing the risks of collisions with similarly named elements that might be present elsewhere within the application.
Using Cloud Testing
While you implement your element locator strategies with Selenium, we would suggest you to implement cloud testing to ensure that you are using these parameters on real devices. The goal of this process is to further refine the accuracy of the test reports.
If you’re a new tester who does not know what is Selenium or what is Selenium WebDriver, there is a high possibility that you don’t know about these platforms either. So to help you refine your understanding, we are going to use the example of LambdaTest for further reference:
LambdaTest is an AI-native test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 3000+ browsers, OS combinations, and 5000+ real devices. While using this platform for running the test cases, you will have access to the following features:
- You can add various automation frameworks like Selenium and Cypress to integrate advanced processes like automated cross-browser testing, automated QA testing, and automated cross-platform testing.
- Using LambdaTest, you can keep track of the test cases and the errors detected due to its native bug-tracking features and real-time test activity logging.
- Moreover, after reading all the test cases, LambdaTest will provide you a detailed test report showing multiple screenshots and videos so that you can easily find all the faulty elements and take the required actions.
Common Pitfalls Of Element Location And How To Avoid Them
To further help you prepare for robust element location with Selenium, we have mentioned some of the major challenges that you can face in this process. During our discussion, we’ll also go through some of the most effective solutions that can help you overcome them:
- An absolute XPath, which starts at the document route, is very likely to break when you have any change in the document object model. To avoid this obstacle, you must always stick to relative Xpaths for element location.
- If you are facing test failure due to elements not being ready, you should add explicit waits to ensure that the test cases are automatically paused until the element becomes visible and interactable.
- If you’re using an application that implements random or hashed class names, you should not rely on them for locating the elements. Instead, you should ask your developers to provide stable identifiers that do not change their location or properties.
- If you’re using hardcoded sleep methods, you’re slowing down your test cases and also hampering their reliability in case of fluctuations in Page load times. Instead of using them, we would recommend you to use explicit or fluid waits.
- If you’re facing a scenario when the element cannot be found on the application, you must verify that you are not dealing with an iframe scenario. To perform this verification process, you must switch contexts appropriately.
The Bottom Line
Based on all the areas that we covered in this article, we can easily see that locating elements in Selenium may not seem straightforward at first, but if you do it with a proper strategy and implementation like we discussed in this article, you can ensure that your tests are both reliable and maintainable.
These strategies will also ensure that you are no longer fighting flaky tests and you have more time to gain additional feedback in applications to further improve your automation testing processes. As a pro tip, we would also ask you to look out for all the upcoming trends and innovations in this segment so that you can further improve your end-user experience with your apps.
For example, it would be a great approach to start incorporating artificial intelligence practices like self-healing scripts, which will further help polish your element location strategies while using the Selenium WebDriver.
