Web applications, and the web pages within these applications, are commonly written in a mix of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript code. Based on user actions like navigating to a website Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or clicking the submit button, a browser sends a request to a web server. Web server processes this request and sends back a response with HTML and related resources, such as JavaScript, CSS, Images, and so on, back to the Browser. The information received from a server is used by the browser to render a web page with various visual elements, such as textboxes, buttons, labels, tables, forms, checkboxes, radio boxes, lists, images, and so on, on the page. While doing so, the browser hides the HTML code and related resources from the user. The user is presented with a graphical user interface in the browser window.

When we want to automate browser interaction using Selenium, we need to tell Selenium how to find a particular...

Before we start exploring how to find elements on a page, we need to analyze the page to understand the Document Object Model (DOM) tree, what properties or attributes are defined for the elements displayed on the page, how JavaScript or AJAX calls are made from the application, and so on.

Browsers use the HTML code written for the page to render visual elements in the browser window. It uses other resources, including JavaScript, CSS, images, and so on, to decide the look, feel, and behavior of these elements.

Here is an example of a BMI Calculator application page and the HTML code written to render this page in a browser, as displayed in the following screenshot:

You can view the code written for a page by right-clicking in the browser window and selecting the View Page Source option from the pop-up menu. This will display the HTML code of the page in a separate window, as shown in the following screenshot:

We need tools that...

Finding elements in Selenium WebDriver is done by using the findElement() and findElements() methods provided by the WebDriver and WebElement interface.

The findElement() method returns an instance of a WebElement that is found in the page DOM based on specified locators, also called search criteria. If it does not find an element using the specified search criteria, it will throw the NoSuchElementFound exception.

The findElements() method returns a list of WebElements matching the search criteria. If no elements are found, it returns an empty list.

Find methods take a locator or a query object as an instance of a By class as an argument. Selenium WebDriver provides a By class to support various locator strategies. The following table lists various locator strategies supported by Selenium WebDriver:

Selenium WebDriver provides the findElements() method, using which we can find more than one element matching the specified search criteria. This method is useful when we want to work with a group of similar elements. For example, we can get all the links displayed on a page, or get all rows from a table, and so on.

In this recipe, we will get all the links and print their targets by using the findElements() method.

@Test
public void testFindElements() {
    //Get all the links displayed on Page
    List<WebElement> links = driver.findElements(By.tagName("a"));

    //Verify there are four links displayed on the page
    assertEquals(4, links.size());

    //Iterate though the list of links and print
    //target for each link
    for(WebElement link : links) {
        System.out.println(link...

Selenium WebDriver provides two special methods to find links on a page. Links can be searched either by their text or by partial text.

Finding links with partial text comes in handy when links have dynamic text. In this recipe, we will see how to use these methods to find links.

WebElement gmailLink = driver.findElement(By.linkText("GMail"));
assertEquals("http://mail.google.com/", gmailLink.getAttribute("href"));