Selenium 2.0 WebDriver – Some useful APIs

To start with WebDriver we need to learn about some of the useful APIs that are provided for automating user actions on an application.

Let us list some of the actions that we need to automate while automating a test case:

1. Click a link, button
2. Type value in an Edit box
3. Select a value from the dropdown
4. “Check / Uncheck “ a checkbox
5. Select a radio button

This is exactly what I am going to discuss in this post.

Click a link / button:

To click on an object through webdriver first we need to find out which locator we are going to use.  Is it ID, name, xpath, or css? For this purpose we can utilize firebug / xpath checker to find out is there any id / name exists for the object we are going to perform action upon.  Then write the code as below:

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//a[@href='CustomerInfo.htm']")).click();

In the above line of code “driver” could be FirefoxDriver, InternetExplorerDriver, ChromeDriver, HtmlUnitDriver, etc.  On one of these browsers we are going to find an element and then click as per the code.

findElement is an API provided by the webdriver which requires argument “By.xpath”.  The “xpath” can be replaced by one of the below methods if we need to identify the element with any other attributes such as css, name, classname, etc:

1. className
2. cssSelector
3. linkText
4. name
5. partialLinkText
6. tagName
7. xpath
8. id

To understand the above methods one needs the basic understanding of the HTML.  Id, name, input, type, a, etc are the HTML tags / attributes.  Using these HTML tags and attributes “xpath” can be constructed and this I have already explained in one of my earlier posts (How to write xpath)

Type value in an Editbox

Have a look at the below line of code.

driver.findElement(By.name("FirstName")).sendKeys("Google");

Here the webdriver finds the object first with findElement API and then keys in the value with sendKeys method.

Select a value from the dropdown

To select a value from a dropdown, follow the below steps:

1. Declare a List and assign all the values of dropdown using findElements method
2. Use a for loop to go through the elements one by one
3. Using an IF condition match the required option
4. Click the required option (.setSelected is deprecated)

Use the below code and put that into a function which does the job.

	public static void selectValue(String valToBeSelected){
        List <WebElement> options = driver.findElements(By.tagName("option"));
		for (WebElement option : options) {
			if (valToBeSelected.equalsIgnoreCase(option.getText())){
				option.click();
			}
		    }
	}

call the static method wherever necessary – selectValue(“Texas”) will select the value Texas from the dropdown country.

“Check / Uncheck “ a checkbox

To “Check / Uncheck” a checkbox, the object needs to be identified using findElement method and then just click.  To find out whether the checkbox is checked or not utilize the method – element.isSelected()

        WebElement kancheck = driver.findElement(By.name("kannada"));
        kancheck.click();
        System.out.println(kancheck.isSelected());

Above code snippet will first click the checkbox named kannada and then verifies whether it is clicked or not.

Select a radio button

Follow the same steps which are used in Checkbox to select a radio button and then verify the status using isSelected() method.

        WebElement gender = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[@name='male']"));
        gender.click();
        System.out.println(gender.isSelected());

Above are the basic actions needed for Test Automation.  I will try to explain this with an example in the next post.

Tagged as: WebDriver, WebDriver APIs