How to Use FindElement(s) to identify Elements in Selenium WebDriver

The objective of this article  is to understand object Identification in selenium for the basic login Page in the application.Let us assume we have username/Password available for website. In this example, We will click on Link for Login, provide username and Password and click on Login button and validate login is successful.

Since we have to perform action on different objects, we need to identify objects or elements in the Page based on properties of the object. We use findElement or findElements to find a particular element or a list of element satisfying the object description. 

The findElement() method returns a WebElement object based on object description and throws exception if it does not find any element matching the object description. To return a webelement object, below is the syntax:

WebElement elemlink = driver.findElement(By.linkText("log in"));

Once we have the webelement defined, we can perform required action on the element. E.g: clicking a link, inputting text in an edit box or get text of the object.

Methods to work on an object using Selenium

In this example, we find collection of all elements in list elemlnk which have tagName as a, i.e collection of all the links in the page. Once we have the list, we can validate if a particular link is available in the Page by comparing the text or validating for broken links in the page based on http response.List<WebElement> elemlnk = driver.findElements(By.tagName("a"));for (int i=0;i<elemlnk.size();i++)
{String strData = elemlnk.get(i).getText();}So now, since we are familiar with basic of WebElement and WebElements, We can go further with the original problem in the Page which was:In this article, we will click on Link for Login, provide username and Password and click on Login button and validate login is successful.

Code for the problem:public void LoginInSagenda() { try {//finding link in the page for login and clicking on the link. WebElement elemlink = driver.findElement(By.linkText("Log in")); elemlink.click(); new WebDriverWait(driver,40).until(ExpectedConditions.titleContains("Log in"));//once link is clicked, we will verify title of the new page if (driver.getTitle().contains("Log in")) { System.out.println("Title of the Page contains text :" + driver.getTitle();          } else { System.out.println("Title of the Page does not contains text : Log in"); } //define elements on which to perform action. Note we use different ways to identify object in page by using Id, name and xpath in the page WebElement usr= driver.findElement(By.id("Email")); WebElement pwd= driver.findElement(By.name("Password")); WebElement login = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[@value='Login']"));// perform required action in the objects identified. usr.sendKeys("abc@xyz.com"); pwd.sendKeys("abcxyz"); login.click();// dynamic wait until a particular condition is met new WebDriverWait(driver,40).until(ExpectedConditions.titleContains("Dashboard"));//once link is clicked, we will verify title of the new page if (driver.getTitle().contains("Dashboard")) { System.out.println("Title of the Page contains text :" + driver.getTitle());   } else { System.out.println("Title of the Page does not contains text : Dashboard");   } } catch (Exception e) { System.out.println(e.getMessage()); }

}

The findElements() method returns a list of WebElements matching the object description. If no elements are found, it returns an empty list.