Locators in selenium are used to locate the web
elements in page. Identification of correct expected web element and to perform
some action on it will be the expectation in Automation. Selenium IDE is
the plugin that will be more helpful to identify the locate the elements in GUI
page. We can use that locator value while doing the scripting. Each and every
web element are presented in HTML tag with open and End tag will be identified
through its attributes.
Different types of
locators in selenium are listed below.
- ID
- Name
- Link
- CSS Selector
- Xpath
- DOM
Target Area - IDE
Locating by ID:
Always ID is the
attribute present in html tag of the web element will be unique. Some of the
web elements will not have the ID attribute.
Syntax :
id= value of Id
of that Specific element
Locating by Name:
Name attribute will be
used to identify the element using the name attribute of element.
Syntax :
Name = Value of Name
attribute of that specific element
Locating by Link:
It used to identify
the hyperlink element in the webpage.
Syntax :
Link = linktext
Locating by CSS
Selector:
It is used to identify
the web elements using string patterns. When an element doesn’t have usual
attributes with unique values such as ID,Name, Class name etc, we can make use
of it.
It will be very fast
in accessing the web elements comparing to other locators.
Syntax and its CSS
types:
- Tag and ID ----> css=Tag#id
- Tag and class ----> css= Tag.class
- Tag and attribute ----> css= tag[attribute = Value]
- Tag, class, and attribute ----> css=tag.class[attribute = value]
- Inner text ---> Tag:contains("text")
When using this
strategy, we always prefix the Target box with "css=" as will be
shown on the following examples.
Locating by Xpath:
XPath is the language
used when locating XML (Extensible Markup Language) nodes. There are two types
in Xpath.
Absolute path – Full
path
Relative path – Reference path
Syntax and its Xpath
types:
- Using Single attribute -//Tag[@attribute = ‘value’]
- Using Multiple attribute-//Tag[@attribute1=’value1’] [@attribute2=’value2’]
- Using Contains method -//Tag[contains(@attribute,’value’)]
- Using Starts-with -//Tag[starts-with(@attribute,’value’)]
- Using Following -//Tag[@attribute =’value’]/following::Tag/
- Using Preceding -//Tag[@attribute =’value’]/preceding::Tag/
- Parent -//Tag[@attribute ='value']/parent::*---->
- Child -//child::tag
- Siblings -//Tag[@attribute =’value’]/preceding-sibling::Tag/
- Siblings -//Tag[@attribute =’value’]/following-sibling::Tag/
Document Object Model
(DOM)
HTML elements are
structured. Selenium IDE is able to use the DOM in accessing page elements.
Syntax for DOM:
- document.getElementById("pass")
- document.getElementsByName("servClass")[1]
- document.forms["home"].elements["userName"] ----> Only applicable when having forms
- document.forms[0].elements[3]
