Second chances – getting valid objects from stale selectors

Now that we have our four primary method wrappers, let us make them more robust with self-healing code. The biggest drawback in automation is the maintenance to fix elements in the Page Object Model (POM) when selectors become stale. In this section, we look at self-healing techniques to find elements that have changed their node type.

Self healing techniques

Let's go over some self-healing techniques in this sub-section.

Reducing code for case-insensitive matches

All these functions will require a conversion to case-insensitive matches. We start by creating two constants to reduce the repeated use of the upper- and lowercase alphabet:

const A_Z = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ';
const a_z = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz';

Next, we will need a function that will extract unique text from a stale locator.

Extracting selector text

This function will try to return the first match...