Selenium Custom Locators

Selenium Web Driver supports both Xpath and CSS Locators as element locator strategies. As these strategies are comprehensive ideally there is no need to provide other abstract strategies such as ID and Class, but providing such strategies OOTB the designers of Selenium have lowered the entry barrier to automation using their library. So as framework developers you can take this further and provide other custom locator strategies to the users. The snippet below shows how a custom by class can be made to wrap around the XPath contains function.

	package com.dumiduh.utils;
	import org.openqa.selenium.By;
	import org.openqa.selenium.SearchContext;
	import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
	import java.util.List;
	public class Text extends By {
	private String searchTerm;
	private final String XPATH = "//*[contains(text(),'%s')]";
	public static By containsText(String searchTerm) {
	return new Text(searchTerm);
	}
	private Text(String value) {
	this.searchTerm = value;
	}
	@Override
	public List<WebElement> findElements(SearchContext context) {
	return context.findElements(By.xpath(String.format(XPATH, searchTerm)));
	}
	}

view raw Text.java hosted with ❤ by GitHub

	package com.dumiduh.other;
	import com.dumiduh.constants.Constants;
	import com.dumiduh.utils.Text;
	import com.dumiduh.utils.TestBase;
	import org.testng.Assert;
	import org.testng.annotations.AfterClass;
	import org.testng.annotations.BeforeClass;
	import org.testng.annotations.Test;
	/***
	* The objective of this test is to demonstrate the use of a custom locator.
	*/
	public class CustomeLocatorTest extends TestBase {
	@BeforeClass
	public static void setup() {
	instantiateDriver();
	driver.get(Constants.DYNAMIC_LOAD);
	}
	@Test
	public static void byContainsText() {
	Assert.assertTrue(driver.findElement(Text.containsText("Powered by")).isDisplayed(), "the expected text value was not found in the html document.");
	}
	@AfterClass
	public static void cleanUp() {
	driver.quit();
	}
	}

view raw CustomeLocatorTest.java hosted with ❤ by GitHub