Locators

Before performing any action on the fields which are present in webpage the selenium has to uniquely identify those fields and that can be done with the help of locators.

 There are 8 eight type of locators:

1)ID:

The most efficient and preferred way to locate an element on the webpage is by ID.

This will be unique which can be easily identified. They are the most safest and fastest type of locators and always be the first choice. Unfortunately there are some cases where element doesn't have unique id. In these  cases we can choose other alternative locator.

2)Name

When there is no ID , the next worth locator can be name.

<button name="Submit">

3)LinkText

Finding an element with LinkText is very simple.If there are multiple links with same link text in such cases selenium will perform action on first matching element.

Eg:<a href="Seleniumhq.org">Downloads</a>

4)Partial LinkText

Both LinkText and Partial LinkText  can be used only if the webelement which has html tag "a".

5)TagName

Tagname can be used with group elements like select, checkboxes/dropdowns

6)ClassName

Finding an element with ClassName is also very simple

7)Xpath

xpath is path of element in Html tree. Inorder to derive the xpath expression we should have complete knowledge on HTML tree.The first forward slash (/) represents beginning of HTML tree which is called root.(Absolute xpath)All other forward slash represents immediate child(Relative xpath). Inorder to check whether xpath expression is correct or not we can use firepath addon which is an additional tab in the firebug window.

8)CSS Selector

CSS stands for Cascade Style Sheet. It is a type of locator with the following syntax:

Here we cant use ID, name or other locator, but we can use TagName locator but it will be duplicate. In such cases we can use CSS locator.

driver.findElement(By.cssselector("input[type='text']").sendkeys("xyz"));

driver.findElement(By.cssselector("input[type='password']").sendkeys("xyz"))