What are the Selenium WebDriver Locators and its usage ?

This article will present you with a complete idea about different selenium webdriver locators and usage of each locator.

What are the Locators?

1. Locators are used to find and match the elements of a page or in an HTML document before you do any action over it .
2. Selenium WebDriver Locators are static methods present in By class and this class is provided by selenium.
3. This By class provides variety of methods to locate any element on a web page, please find below the details:
  - ID
  - Name
  - Class Name
  - Tag Name
  - Link Text
  - Partial Link Text
  - CSS Selector
  - XPath

Locating elements in Selenium WebDriver is done by using the method findElement() and findElements() which is provided by WebDriver and WebElement class.

How to find locator of a element ?

1. Access DOM in google chrome by pressing F12 or by right click on the web page
2. And Click on inspect as per below screenshot then you can be able to see the properties/tags of the particular element.

Below are the detailed description of each locator

1) ID Locator :

- We can locate an element using the ID attribute.
- As per W3C, ID’s should be unique on a page and it makes ID’s are the most reliable locator.
- ID locators are the fastest and safest locators out of all locators.

   driver.findElement(By.id("IdName"))

2) Name Locator:

- We can locate an element using the Name attribute.
- These are not unique on a page and elements may have the same name.
- The test may fail if another element with the same Name locator is present on the web page or it is added by dev after test case addition.

driver.findElement(By.name("Name"))

3) Class Name Locator:

- We can locate an element using the Class attribute.
- This locator identifies the element which matches the values specified in the attribute name “class”.

driver.findElement(By.className("element-class"))

4) TagName Locator:

- This locator is used to identify the element using HTML TagName
- It is very helpful when we want to extract the content within a Tag.

     driver.findElement(By.tagName("HTML TagName"))

5) Link Text Locator:

- This locator is used to Identify the element using the name of the link.
- As name says this locator works only on links or hyperlinks
- If there are multiple elements with the same link text then the first one will be selected.

driver.findElement(By.linkText("LinkText"))

6) Partial Link Text:

This locator is used to Identify the element using part or portion of the link present on a page.

findElement(By.partialLinkText("partialLinkText"))

7) CSS Selector Locator:

- Css on any page used to create style and it can be used to identify any web element.
- As major QAs believe that use of CSS selector makes the execution of script faster compared to XPath locator.

Below are some of the mainly used formats of CSS Selectors.

Tag and ID (css= tag#id)

driver.findElement(By.cssSelector(tag#id))

Tag and Class (css= tag.class)

driver.findElement(By.cssSelector(tag.class))

Tag and Attribute (css= tag[attribute=value])

driver.findElement(By.cssSelector(tag[attribute=value]))

Tag, Class and Attribute (css= tag.class[attribute=value])

driver.findElement(By.cssSelector(tag.class[attribute=value]))

8) Xpath Locator:

- Xpath locator is used to Identify the object using any attributes or a text.
- if elements are not found by these locators like ID, class, name, tag name etc., then Xpath is used to find an element on the web page.
- Xpath produces reliable locators but performance-wise it is slower compared to CSS Selector.

driver.findElement(By.xpath("Xpath"))

Below are the examples of writing a xpath

 Xpath:    //tagname[@attribute=’value’]

Xpath: html/body/div[5]/div[2]/div/div[2]/div[2]/h2[1]

There are two types of XPath:

- Absolute Xpath
- Relative Xpath

Absolute XPath

- Absolute xpath tries to locate the element from the root. i.e. complete path.
- Absolute xpath fails to identify the element whenever any change in the DOM structure or element location change
- Absolute xpath always starts with ‘/ ‘

Relative Xpath

- Relative XPath tries to locate the element directly, instead of locating from root.
- Relative xpath always starts with ‘//’
- it never fails to identify elements after change in the location of elements or If any change in DOM structure .
- Relative Xpath is written directly from the Web Element using Web Element attribute

There are multiple ways for writing Relative xpath which are as follows.

- Standard Xpath
- Using Xpath with AND & OR
- Using text in Xpath
- Using Contains
- Using starts-with

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