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Selenium Testing Tools Cookbook

You're reading from   Selenium Testing Tools Cookbook Unlock the full potential of Selenium WebDriver to test your web applications in a wide range of situations. The countless recipes and code examples provided ease the learning curve and provide insights into virtually every eventuality.

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Product type Paperback
Published in Nov 2012
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781849515740
Length 326 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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UNMESH GUNDECHA UNMESH GUNDECHA
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UNMESH GUNDECHA
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Toc

Table of Contents (18) Chapters Close

Selenium Testing Tools Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
1. Locating Elements FREE CHAPTER 2. Working with Selenium API 3. Controlling the Test Flow 4. Data-driven Testing 5. Using the Page Object Model 6. Extending Selenium 7. Testing on Mobile Browsers 8. Client-side Performance Testing 9. Testing HTML5 Web Applications 10. Recording Videos of Tests 11. Behavior-driven Development Index

Locating links


Selenium WebDriver provides multiple ways to locate links. You can locate a link either by its text or by partial text.

Locating links with partial text comes in handy when links have dynamic text. In this recipe, we will see how to use these methods to locate the links on page.

How to do it...

Let's create a sample test to see how locating links work in Selenium WebDriver with the following options.

Finding a link by its text

Selenium WebDriver's By class provides the linkText() method to locate links using the text displayed for the link. In the following example, we will locate the GMail link:

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

Finding a link by partial text

Selenium WebDriver's By class also provides a method to locate links using partial text. This method is useful where developers create links with dynamic text. In this example, a link is provided to open inbox. This link also displays the number of new e-mails which may change dynamically. Here we can use the partialLinkText() method to locate the link using a fixed or known portion of the link text, in this case it would be inbox.

WebElement inboxLink = driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Inbox"));
System.out.println(inboxLink.getText());     

How it works...

The linkText and partialLinkText locator methods query the driver for all the links that meet the specified text and returns the matching link(s).

There's more...

You can also locate links using id, name, or class attributes if developers have provided these attributes.

Note

Locating elements based on text can cause issues while testing applications in multiple locales. Using parameterized text locator value could work in such applications.

See also

  • The Locating an element using the findElement method recipe

  • The Locating elements using findElements method recipe

You have been reading a chapter from
Selenium Testing Tools Cookbook
Published in: Nov 2012
Publisher: Packt
ISBN-13: 9781849515740
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