Selenium what is xpath

This is totally opposite to Following-sibling. In this case, you can traverse to sibling nodes before the context node. Here is the XPath for this:.

Please make sure that you are giving the right index value; otherwise, you may get located on some other web element, which may lead to the failure of your automated test case.

When automating functional tests with Selenium , it is often not clear which locator and what strategy is to be used to locate the desired element. Choosing a good locator plays a vital role in our automation framework as it defines how reliable, maintainable, and durable our automation scripts would be.

Since we have covered different XPath methods above, you might be thinking about which method would be more feasible. There are actually a few set of things that need to be noticed before choosing any method like:.

Scope: It is always important not to be dependent on page design choices while choosing the locator method. Instead, the choices must be created on the basis of durability and reliability, which actually defines the long-term scope of each locator method.

For instance, it is good to use the relative XPath technique rather than the absolute Xpath technique since the absolute path may break your script if any element structure gets changed from the root. Technology: It is said, do not be dependent on UI implementation technology to automate UI test cases. For example, in the case of an AngularJS application, try not to use angular attributes like ng-binding or ng-scope while creating an XPath with any of the methods.

The more elements you add in a path to locate the desired element, the higher is the chance that even a minor change in UI would break your locator. Hence, trying to include a minimum number of elements or attributes to form an XPath is said to be a good practice. As the name suggests, SelectorsHub is the hub of selectors supported by Selenium. It is a browser extension and free to use a plugin that auto-suggests XPath based on multiple XPath methods. So basically, SelectorsHub was released with a motive to enhance XPath creating skills and selecting the robust locator among multiple combinations.

To know more about this innovation, please have a look at this amazing SelectorsHub tutorial. Published at DZone with permission of Ramit Dhamija. See the original article here. Performance Zone. Thanks for visiting DZone today,. Edit Profile. Sign Out View Profile. Over 2 million developers have joined DZone. It provides the path expression to navigate through elements and attributes. Like 2. Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Join For Free.

What is XPath in Selenium? Tagname: Defines the tag name for the element to be located. AttributeName: Defines an attribute of the tag defined at the starting of the XPath. Value: Represents the value of an attribute defined.

Below we will see some of these methods. Selects all elements in the document of the current node [ UserID input box is the current node] as shown in the below screen. If you want to focus on any particular element then you can use the below XPath method:.

The ancestor axis selects all ancestors element grandparent, parent, etc. If you want to focus on any particular element then you can use the below XPath, where you change the number 1, 2 as per your requirement:.

If you want to focus on any particular element then you can use the below xpath:. If you want to focus on any particular element then you can use the below XPath:.

Select the following siblings of the context node. Siblings are at the same level of the current node as shown in the below screen. It will find the element after the current node. It always finds only one node as it represents self-element.

XPath is required to find an element on the web page as to do an operation on that particular element. Skip to content. What is XPath in Selenium? Report a Bug. Previous Prev. Next Continue. Home Testing Expand child menu Expand. SAP Expand child menu Expand. Web Expand child menu Expand. The following example retrieves the same element, but this time using the relative XPath:. Selenium has its pros and cons , as any tool does.

XPath is certainly no exception to that. The main pro of finding elements via XPath is that it allows you to interact with dynamic elements, which are impossible or hard for you to locate via IDs or other attributes.

The main cons of using XPath in testing relate to the robustness of test cases. Since XPath relies on attributes of the elements that can be changed, tests that use XPath for element location can suddenly fail when those elements are updated. This causes a scenario where test maintenance is a burden. So, what are the similarities and differences between the two?

Right off the bat we can say—just by their names—that findElement returns a single element while its counterpart returns more than one element. Not really rocket science, right? If more than one matching element is found, findElement will return the first element, while findElements will return a zero-based indexed array with all elements. What if no element is found?

Finally, the verdict. Which one is better? Which one should you use? In this case, you can also use the findElements version and check for the length of the resulting list. In other words, this element not being found means something very wrong has happened. In the context of testing web applications, locating elements on the page is one of the most fundamental tasks you need to perform. Is there a way out of this problem?

As it turns out, there is. And the answer is to leverage better tools. One such tool is Testim. Testim accomplishes this by inspecting the complete DOM structure of the web app. When doing that, Testim identifies many different attributes it uses to uniquely identify each element from the webpage.

We invite you to take a look and give Testim a try today. Thanks for reading, and until the next time. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information. Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies.

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