The drawback is that they are slower, a visual command takes typically one to a few seconds for the computer vision to find the image or text. This locator uses computer vision image recognition to find the right place on the screen.

Note that it does not find web elements, but "places". So it works the same on website, Citrix, SAP, PDF documents or for general desktop automation. This locator is supported by the XClick , XMove , and all GUI testing commands. Example of using image recognition for automation PROS: 1.

Easy to use 2. Works for testing canvas elements 3. Works with desktop apps CONS: 1. Replay speed is slower than classic Selenium locators.

The text locator uses computer vision OCR to find the right place on the screen by searching for text. This locator is supported by the XClick and XMove commands.

Example: See OCR Clicks PROS: 1. Extremely easy to use 2. Works with desktop apps 4. Since it uses OCR screen scraping , this locator is stable against resolution, color, font and even size changes.

Replay speed is slower than classic Selenium locators 2. Obviously works with text only, but not with buttons and icons. The DOM strategy works by locating elements that matches a certain javascript expression. The UI-elements locators not to be confused with modern visual GUI locators! is an even more complex way to describe elements using pagesets and regular expressions.

These two locator types are not useful for working with Selenium IDE and can be safely ignored. In addition to the "first choice" main locator, the UI.

The IDE records and keeps all possible locators and uses them if the primary locator as picked by the IDE fails. This is a great way to save time during script development and find the best locator strategy.

For example, it often finds a solution for dynamic IDs automatically. After the search for the primary locator times out, the IDE tries every secondary locator in the list, until one matches:.

Here the primary locator failed because the element ID changed. But a secondary locator that does not use the ID locator strategy works. We make this secondary locator the main locator and can now safely delete the list of secondary locators that are stored in the TARGETS value.

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Selenium IDE Locators. Different types of Selenium IDE Locators. Text Locator OCR Selenium IDE Locators ID Locator The ID locators looks for an element in the page having an id attribute. Solution: Match changing ID Name Locator Like the Id locator, but on the name attribute. Link Locator This locator works with links only.

Fails when the link text changes between page loads XPath Locator XPath is the standard navigation tool for XML and an HTML document is also an XML document xHTML. CSS Locator The CSS locator strategy uses CSS selectors to find the elements in the page.

Visual GUI Locators Visual locators are not available in the standard Selenium IDE, but only in RPA software. Image Locator This locator uses computer vision image recognition to find the right place on the screen. Replay speed is slower than classic Selenium locators Text Locator OCR The text locator uses computer vision OCR to find the right place on the screen by searching for text.

Obviously works with text only, but not with buttons and icons What about the DOM and UI-element locators? Appendix Selenium IDE locator strategy Primary and Secondary Locators In addition to the "first choice" main locator, the UI.

After the search for the primary locator times out, the IDE tries every secondary locator in the list, until one matches: Here the primary locator failed because the element ID changed. Related topics Web Scraping with Selenium IDE Anything wrong or missing on this page?

then please contact us. Follow UI. Subscribe to the UI Vision RPA software newsletter. We'll send you updates on new releases that we're working on. Locators are one of the essential components of Selenium infrastructure, which help Selenium scripts in uniquely identifying the WebElements such as text box, button, etc.

present of the web page. So, how do we get the values of these locators? And how to use the same in the automation framework? Let's first understand on the whole page, how we can identify a specific web element in DOM and then we will try to grab its locator:.

As we all know, the first thing to start with is to find the HTML element in DOM Document Object Model , for which we need to grab the locator.

We can follow the following steps to identify the web element in DOM on a web browser:. Note : We are showing the steps to identify the web element in Google chrome. The steps for other browsers will almost be the same, apart from the way how you can open the DOM in that browser.

DOM can be accessed in Google Chrome either by pressing F12 or by right click on the web page and then by selecting Inspect as shown in the screenshot below. Now, the main point is, how do we find the web element in the DOM.

Click on the " Mouse Icon " arrow as designated by Marke 1 in below screenshot and then select the web element on the web page. It will automatically highlight the corresponding HTML element in the DOM. Suppose we want to find the HTML elements corresponding to the banner image as shown below by marker 3.

When we select the mouse point and click on the banner image, it will automatically highlight the corresponding HTML element, as shown by marker 2 , in the below screenshot:. So, this way, we can easily search the HTML element in the DOM corresponding to a web element on the webpage.

Now, let's try to understand how we can grab a locator for these web elements, which can be directly used by Selenium to identify these web elements uniquely:. There are various types of locators, using which we can identify a web element uniquely on the Webpage.

The following figure shows a good depiction of several types of locators that Selenium supports. It offers several different methods some of which are in the image below like className, cssSelector, id, linkText, name, partialLinkText, taName, and xpath, etc.

You can quickly identify all the supported locators by Selenium by browsing all the visible methods on the " By " class, as shown below:. As we mentioned above, Selenium supports various types of locators. Let's under the details and usage of all of them:. According to W3C , an ID for a web element always needs to be unique.

The ID is one of the fastest and unique ways of locating web elements and is considered as one of the most reliable methods for determining an element. But with the advancement in technologies and more of the dynamic web pages , " IDs " are generated dynamically and generally not the reliable way to locate a web element, as they change for different users.

Let's understand the usage of the " id " attribute for locating a web element with the help of an example. When we inspect it in DOM , we see the following DOM structure:.

As we can see, the " Input " HTML tag has the following properties and attributes:. As we can see that we have used the " By. id " method, and we have passed the " firstName ", which is the " id " of the text box we are trying to locate. So, this way, we can locate any web element which has a specified " id " attribute associated with it.

Similar to the id attribute, Selenium also offers users a way to identify the element using the name attribute. So, if we are going to use the name attribute for the identification of a web element, we should always make sure that the name attribute must contain a unique value. Otherwise, it may identify several different elements on the same page, which may have the same name value.

So, we always recommend making sure that the value of the name attribute should be unique when we select it for locating a web element. Let's understand the usage of the " name " attribute for locating a web element with the help of an example.

As we can see, the " Input " HTML tag representing the Male Checkbox has the following properties and attributes:. We can use the following syntax to locate the web element using the " By " class.

As we can see, the " By " class provides the " name " method, which accepts the value of the " name " attribute of the web element. So, using this, we can locate a web element that has a unique name attribute.

ClassName allows SeleniumSelenium to find web elements based on the class values of the DOM. For example, if we want to identify or perform any operation on the form element, we can use the class to identify it.

If we look at the DOM structure of the form, we can see the following snippet eclosing the entire form. We can use the class attribute value from the above DOM to identify the form. To identify the same on the webpage, we can use the following syntax. To identify it successfully, we need to make sure that the class name value that we are using for locating the web element, i.

If any other class contains the same value as this, then Selenium will select whichever element comes first while scrapping through the web page. LinkText and partialLinkText both are quite similar in functionality and locate web elements by using the hyperlink texts.

Similar to other locator strategies, if multiple hyperlinks with the same texts are present on the page, then Selenium will always choose the first one.

Suppose we need to click on the link as shown below for the " Home " link:. For identifying elements using link text or partial link text , we need to use the hyperlink text, as shown below:. Similarly, partial link text can also recognize the element by using part of the hyperlink text , as shown below:.

This locator type uses tag names to identify elements in a web page. The tagName locator returns all the elements from the page that contains a specified tag. CSS or Cascading style sheets are used extensively to style webpages and hence can be an effective medium to locate various web elements.

These days most of the web pages are dynamically designed. Thus its quite challenging to get a unique id, name, or class to locate element. In this type of situation, CSS selectors can be a great alternative as these are way faster compared to another locator strategies.

Similarly, we can use other attributes along with the tags to define different CSS locators. We will discuss more details about the CSS selector in another tutorial. XPath uses the XML expression to locate an element on the webpage.

Similar to CSS selectors, Xpath is quite useful in locating dynamic elements on a webpage. Xpath can access any element present in the webpage even when they have dynamic properties. Here we have used the input tag and id attribute to identify the element.

We will cover the more in-depth details of the " XPath locator " strategy in another article. The following code snippet shows the usage of various types of Selenium locators to identify and searches the elements on the web page:.

Now, the interaction with any web application requires the Selenium driver to identify web elements on the page.

The Id strategy looks for an element in the page having an id attribute corresponding to the specified pattern. Like the Id strategy, but on the name attribute. You can also specify a filter to refine your locator.

Currently, there are two filter types :. Value : matches elements with a name attribute and where the value follows a pattern. The following example illustrates the interest of filters :. we just added a strawberry pancake in our application and we want to test that the button that adds it into the cart works.

The DOM strategy works by locating elements that matches the javascript expression refering to an element in the DOM of the page. While DOM is the recognized standard for navigation through an HTML element tree, XPath is the standard navigation tool for XML; and an HTML document is also an XML document xHTML.

XPath is used everywhere where there is XML. Valid XPath locators can be:. The CSS locator strategy uses CSS selectors to find the elements in the page.

Selenium supports CSS 1 through 3 selectors syntax excepted CSS3 namespaces and the following:. As a general rule, keep in mind that if a locator matches several elements, only the first one will be effectively used by Selenium.

Structure-based locators: locators that rely on the structure of the page to find elements. Attributes-based locators: locators that relies on the attributes of the elements to locate them.

What do you think are the limitations of Selenium IDE? What problems do you foresee with this test? Selenium Tutorial: Locators. Prev Next. Identifier Id Name Link DOM XPath CSS UI-element. Easily matches several elements: try to name your username field as login. Each id is supposed to be unique so no chance of matching several elements.

Works well only on elements with fixed ids and not generated ones. Index : same as name but works with an index. Tip the index starts at 0. Works well with fixed list of similar elements. In this case, it is the ID of the text box. Values are entered into the text box using the sendkeys method with the help of ID cdensity.

Here an object is accessed with the help of names. In this case, it is the name of the text box. Here an object is accessed with the help of Class Names.

In this case, it is the Class name of the WebElement. The Value can be accessed with the help of the gettext method. The DOM Tag Name of an element can be used to locate that particular element in the WebDriver.

It is very easy to handle tables with the help of this method. Take a look at the following code. The CSS is used as a method to identify the webobject, however NOT all browsers support CSS identification. XPath stands for XML path language.

These locators are helpful when it is not easy to construct a locator for the desired element, but easy to describe spatially where the element is in relation to an element that does have an easily constructed locator. Selenium uses the JavaScript function getBoundingClientRect to determine the size and position of elements on the page, and can use this information to locate neighboring elements.

Relative locator methods can take as the argument for the point of origin, either a previously located element reference, or another locator.

If the relative positioning is not obvious, or it varies based on window size, you can use the near method to identify an element that is at most 50px away from the provided locator. You can also chain locators if needed. Want to support the Selenium project?

Learn more or view the full list of sponsors. Documentation WebDriver Elements Locators v4. Locator strategies Ways to identify one or more specific elements in the DOM. findElement By.

className "information" ;. Chrome driver. FindElement By. ClassName "information" ;. for :chrome driver. forBrowser 'chrome'.

className 'information' ;. className "information". cssSelector " fname" ;. CssSelector " fname" ;. css ' fname' ;.

css " fname". id "lname" ;. ID , "lname". Id "lname" ;. id 'lname' ;. id "lname". name "newsletter" ;. NAME , "newsletter". Name "newsletter" ;. name 'newsletter' ;. name "newsletter". linkText "Selenium Official Page" ;. LinkText "Selenium Official Page" ;. linkText 'Selenium Official Page' ;.

linkText "Selenium Official Page". partialLinkText "Official Page" ;. PartialLinkText "Official Page" ;. partialLinkText 'Official Page' ;. partialLinkText "Official Page". tagName "a" ;. TagName "a" ;. tagName 'a' ;. Methods provided by WebDriver and WebElement class:.

Locators in selenium are:. CSS Selector:. PartialLink text:. Share the Knol:. Methods provided by WebDriver and WebElement class: findElement returns a WebElement object based on a specified search criterion or ends up throwing an exception Likewise if it does not find any element matching the search criteria.

Locators in selenium are: 1. CSS Selector 3. className 4. name 5. LinkText 6. PartialLink text 7. TagName 8. XPath 1. ID: This locator in selenium is the most preferred and fastest way to locate desired WebElements on the page.

Syntax: driver. findElement By. And then we visit the below page and choose the id selector from there. CSS Selector: CSS Cascading Style Sheets is use to style web pages. syntax : driver. ClassName : Class Name locator is use for locating WebElements that are define using the class attribute.

Name: An element can be defined via multiple attributes, one such attribute is Name. Synatx: driver. LinkText: Elements can be located via link text that is present in the hyperlinks. However, this Identifier strategy can only be use for elements that have an anchor a tag.

synatx: driver. PartialLink text : There is a provision to locate a web element using Partial Link Text akin to the normal Link Text locator in Selenium.

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Become a Certified Professional. Updated on 17th Jul, 23 9. What are Locators? What are Locators Used For? What are Locators in Testing? Different Types of Locators in Selenium Locators in Selenium Webdriver Advantages of Locators in Selenium WebDriver Conclusion Watch the video below to learn Selenium from scratch.

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