Locating an Element

Locating Techniques

Useful XPATH patterns

Text

Starts with

Contians

Siblings

starts-with

Many sites use dynamic values for element’s id attributes, which can make them difficult to locate. One simple solution is to use XPath functions and base the location on what you do know about the element. For example, if your dynamic ids have the format  where 12345 is a dynamic number you could use the following XPath://input[starts-with(@id, 'text-')]

contains

If an element can be located by a value that could be surrounded by other text, the contains function can be used. To demonstrate, the element  can be located based on the ‘heading’ class without having to couple it with the ‘top’ and ‘bold’ classes using the following XPath: //span[contains(@class, 'heading')]. Incidentally, this would be much neater (and probably faster) using the CSS locator strategy css=span.heading

Starting to use CSS instead of XPATH

Locating elements based on class

In order to locate an element based on associated class in XPath you must consider that the element could have multiple classes and defined in any order, however with CSS locators this is much simpler (and faster).

• XPath: //div[contains(@class, 'article-heading')]

CSS: css=div.article-heading