In today's blog post, we'll dive into two common web automation challenges that Selenium testers often face: handling auto-suggest dropdowns and static web tables. Understanding how to interact with these elements can significantly enhance your Selenium skills, making your scripts more robust and versatile.
1. Handling Auto-suggest Dropdowns in Selenium
An auto-suggest dropdown is a dynamic feature used on many websites where a list of suggestions appears as you type. It’s commonly seen in search fields or forms. For example, when you type "Selenium" in Google, you immediately get a dropdown list of suggested queries.
Step-by-Step Guide:
Scenario: Let’s assume we are testing a website where you need to type a country name in an input box, and a list of suggestions appears dynamically.
Code Example:
Explanation:
- First, we navigate to the website with an auto-suggest feature.
- We use the
sendKeys
method to simulate typing in the input field. - The suggestions are fetched using the
findElements
method, targeting the list of suggestions by their common XPath. - We then loop through the list of suggestions, click the desired option, and proceed with further actions.
2. Handling Static Web Tables in Selenium
Static web tables are often used to display data in a grid or tabular format. In contrast to dynamic tables, static tables have a fixed structure, meaning their rows and columns don’t change during runtime. A typical scenario is reading data from a table on a website and validating its content.
Step-by-Step Guide:
Scenario: Let’s consider a web page containing a table of student records, and we want to retrieve specific data from it.
Code Example:
Explanation:
- We first locate the table using its ID and then capture all the rows.
- For each row, we capture the data from individual cells using the
findElements
method, looping through rows (tr
) and columns (td
). - The data is printed row by row, but you can easily adapt this for validation purposes.
Key Takeaways
Auto-suggest Dropdown:
- Interacting with dynamic dropdowns requires locating the input box, sending partial text, waiting for suggestions, and then selecting the correct one.
Static Web Table:
- Handling static tables involves identifying the table structure and iterating through rows and columns to fetch and manipulate data.
Mastering these concepts will help you tackle many common test cases related to user input fields and data validation in web automation projects. As always, make sure to adapt the code snippets to your specific use cases and environment.