Capturing screenshots of elements in the Selenium WebDriver

The TakesScreenshot interface captures the screenshot of the entire page, current window, visible portion of the page, or of the complete desktop window in their respective order as supported by the browser. It does not provide a way to capture an image of the specific element.

We can extend the screen capture functionality to capture images of WebElement using the Java Image API in addition to the TakesScreenshot interface.

In this recipe, we will implement a helper method to capture images of elements.

How to do it...

Let's implement the captureElementPicture() method to capture an image of WebElement. We will pass a WebElement instance to this method; the following code shows an example:

public static File captureElementPicture(WebElement element)
      throws Exception {

    // Get the WrapsDriver of the WebElement
    WrapsDriver wrapsDriver = (WrapsDriver) element;

    // Get the entire Screenshot from the driver of passed WebElement...