Locating elements using findElements method

Selenium WebDriver provides the findElements() method, which enables the acquisition of a list of elements 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 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.

How to do it...

Let's create a test which will get all the links from a page and verify the count of links and print target for each link as follows:

@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.getAttribute("href"));
        
}

How it works...

The findElements() method returns all the elements matching with the locator specified as a list of WebElements. In Java, we can use the List class to create an instance of list of WebElements.

List<WebElement> links = driver.findElements(By.tagName("a"));

The size() method of the List class will tell us how many elements are there in the list.

assertEquals(4, links.size());

We can iterate using this list in the following way, getting a link and printing its target value:

for(WebElement link : links)
    System.out.println(link.getAttribute("href"));

See also

• The Locating an element using the findElement method recipe