You will be required to have Java 8, Maven, Selenium WebDriver 3.13, Eclipse Kepler or higher and Google Chrome.

The code files of this chapter can be found on GitHub:
https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Selenium-WebDriver-Quick-Start-Guide/tree/master/Chapter02

Check out the following video to see the code in action:
http://bit.ly/2PY4oP1

The DOM is an application programming interface that is linked to HTML, XHTML, or XML documents and treats these similar to a tree where each node in the tree represents a part of the document.

In simple words, the DOM can be compared to a tree where there is a root node, intermediate nodes, and leaf nodes.

Shown here is a sample DOM:

In the preceding diagram, there are three leaf nodes, two intermediate nodes, and one root node. All of this is contained in a document. The question that arises next is: how do we get to a particular node in this tree structure? This is where terms such as XPath and...

Now that we have seen the basic definitions of XPaths and CSS and also looked at what WebElements are, let's understand how we can use these to exploit the DOM. DOM traversal entails getting to the desired element with the help of either XPaths or CSS. It is possible to traverse the DOM in a forward and backward direction with XPaths but traversal through XPaths is slow compared to CSS. Traversal using CSS can only be done in the forward direction. In order to traverse the DOM, using either XPaths or CSS, we need to understand the By class.

The By class is an abstract class that has eight static methods and eight inner classes. Let's understand the structure of the By class.

In the subsequent chapters, we will be dealing with a lot Excel data. In order to make data manipulation simpler using Excel, Codoid, a software firm, introduced the Fillo API. This API can be used for both XLS and XLSX files. It's an open source API. Fillo can be used to trigger select, insert, and update operations with where conditions. It also supports like and multiple where conditions. Let's understand how to make use of this useful API. First of all, let's add the Maven dependency for Fillo. Put the dependency shown here in pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.codoid.products</groupId>
    <artifactId>fillo</artifactId>
    <version>1.18</version>
</dependency>

To start using Fillo in the code, create a class file in Eclipse and type the following code in a main method. This code first...

During the coding journey, a very useful technique to figure out logic problems is known as debugging. You remove the bugs in the code using debugging. To use the debugger in Eclipse, navigate to the Run | Debug As menu, or simply press F11:

You will get the popup shown previously. Optionally, click on Remember my decision and then click on the Yes button.

The screen that gets displayed is shown as follows:

The box labelled 1 is where the variable and expression values can be checked and the box labelled 2 is the breakpoint on which the execution has halted. Now one can progress line-by-line using F5 or F6. F5 will go into each individual called method, whereas F6 will not. Clicking F8 will continue the execution, which might halt at the next breakpoint, if present.

The topic of debugging can consume an entire mini-book but as far as this book is concerned...

In this chapter, we had a look at the different locators available for desktop as well as mobile applications. We saw examples of absolute and relative XPaths (customized XPaths) and also how to construct XPaths dynamically. We had a look at the tagName static method and also understood how to find elements with container elements. Next, we had a look at mobile locators and the different tools available to us for automating mobile applications. We understood the different types of mobile applications. Finally, we touched on debugging in the Eclipse IDE. In Chapter 3, Basic Selenium Commands and Their Usage in Building a Framework, we will start looking at writing pieces of code in a linear fashion.