Dealing with dynamic object IDs

Although having a good development design with testability in mind is the ideal scenario (and we hope this book helps developers achieve it), the reality is not always as ideal. Sometimes, we inherit old code that has been built as a quick proof of concept or by someone that did not really care for testing so much. In this section, we will see some examples of that and what can we do to automate as much as possible around this. One example is the localized locators that we discussed earlier.

Items with dynamic locators

Sometimes, it is useful for an application to generate objects automatically. This happens quite frequently in games, where you can find sprites being generated as particles, bullets, or enemies. These may have an auto-generated ID (or another locator).

If that is the case, we should try looking for the object type, using a CSS locator for a particular class or similar.

Here’s an example of finding elements using a CSS...