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In this tutorial, we will go through what are Locators and different type of locators in Selenium. The prerequisite of any automation tool is to locate the web elements on a web page. Buy WHY?
One of the example is that suppose you want to login to gmail using any automation tool. Therefore, in this case you need to enter your email or phone and click on Next button. Here, Email Textbox and Next button are web elements.
Table of Contents
Web Elements can be anything link TextBox, CheckBox, Radio Buttons, Links, Dropdowns, Image, soon.
What is Locator?
Locator is unique address of any web element on web page.
Types of Locators in Selenium
In this tutorial, we will use http://www.facebook.com for showing the use of different locators
How to find web elements?
1) Locating by ID
Find the input element with ID.
Syntax
driver.findElement(By.id(“email”))
2) Locating by ClassName
Find the input element with name of class
Syntax
driver.findElement(By.ClassName("inputtext"))
3) Locating by TagName
Find the input element with TagName
Syntax
driver.findElement(By.tagName("select"))
4) Locating by Name
Find the input element with matching name attribute.
Syntax
driver.findElement(By.name("email"))
5) Locating by Linktext
Find the link element with matching visible text
Syntax
driver.findElement(By.linkText("Forgot account?"))
6) Partial Link Text
Find the link element with partial matching visible text
Syntax
driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Forgot "))
7) XPath
Full form of XPath is XML Path. It is used to locate a web element on a web page using HTML DOM structure
Syntax
By.xpath("//tagname[@Attribute = ‘value’]")
//: select the current node.
tagname: name of the tag of a particular node.
@: to select attribute.
Attribute: name of the attribute of the node.
Value: value of the attribute
There are 2 types of Xpath:-
1) Absolute Path
2) Relative Path
Absolute Path – It is the direct way to find any element. But as name suggest, it needs to be absolute. Any change made in the path will fail the xpath, result tool will not be able to locate the we element on the page.
Syntax
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[@id='yDmH0d']/div/div/div[2]/div[2]/div/div/div/div/div/div/ form/content/section/div/content/div/div/div/div/div/input"))
Relative Path –Relative XPath begins from the current location and is prefixed with a “//”. It starts from the middle of the DOM structure. To know more about XPath, click here
Syntax
By.xpath("//input[@name='identifier']")
8) CSS Selectors
CSS Selectors are string patterns used to identify an element based on a combination of HTML tag, id, class, and attributes. Locating by CSS Selector is more complicated than the previous methods, but it is the most common locating strategy of advanced Selenium users because it can access even those elements that have no ID or name. To know more about CSS, click here
Below is an example that shows how to use different locators. In this example, we have used Id, name, className, tagName, partialLinkText and LinkText locators.
package org.example;
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeOptions;
import java.time.Duration;
import java.util.List;
public class Automation_Practice_Form {
protected static WebDriver driver;
public static void main(String[] args) {
ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.addArguments("--start-maximized");
driver = new ChromeDriver(options);
driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(Duration.ofSeconds(2));
driver.get("https://opensource-demo.orangehrmlive.com/");
driver.manage().window().maximize();
// Locate link by partialLinkText
String PartialLinkText_Text = driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Orange")).getText();
System.out.println("Text of PartialLinkText Locator is ->" + PartialLinkText_Text);
// Locate FirstName by name
driver.findElement(By.name("username")).sendKeys("Admin");
// Locate LastName by id
driver.findElement(By.name("password")).sendKeys("admin123");
// Locate options of DropDown by tagName
List<WebElement> linkName = driver.findElements(By.tagName("a"));
System.out.println("List of Links:");
for (WebElement link : linkName) {
System.out.println(link.getText() + " - " +link.getAttribute("href"));
}
driver.close();
}
}
The output of the above program is
That’s it! Congratulations on making it through this tutorial and hope you found it useful! Happy Learning!!
QA Automation Expert 