Selenium IDE Xpath vs Webdriver Xpath

Question

I'm newbie with Test Automation. When I locating element through Firepath with target:

 xpath=(//td[contains(@id, 'catProdTd_4723290')]/div/div[2]/h2)

Firefox founds that element and verify text. But, when I trying to locate this element with Visual Studio 2012 and Selenium Web driver, I constantly have error: "Unable to locate element: {"method":"xpath","selector":"//td[contains(@id, 'catProdTd_4723290')]/div/div[2]/h2"}" .

I tried escaping:

//td[@id=\"catProdTd_4723290\"]/div/div[2]/h2

but nothing. When I use isElementPresent method, it founds elements. Is there some special method or rule that should be use when writing Xpath for WebDriver ? I defined ISelenium variable, WebDriver... Clicks works, WaitForPageToLoad works, but this can not locate element.

IWebElement we= driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//td[contains(@id, 'catProdTd_4723290')]/div/div[2]/h2"));

HTML from page:

<td class="productItem" id="catProdTd_4723290"><div class="product-details">
    <div class="product-aside"> <img border="0" alt="Fork and Spoon Set" src="/_photos/store/glass-large.jpg" id="catlproduct_4723290">
     </div>
    <div class="product-main">
    <h2 class="product-name">Fork and Spoon Set</h2>
    <div class="price"><strong>$17.99</strong></div>
    <hr>

    <div class="attributes"></div>
    <hr>
    <div class="product-col-1">
    <div class="qty"> Quantity: <strong><input type="text" value="1" name="AddToCart_Amount" class="productTextInput" id="Units_4723290"></strong></div>
    <div class="stock">(N/A in-stock)</div>
    </div>
    <div class="product-col-2">
    <input type="submit" onclick="AddToCart(192951,4723290,'',4,'','',true);return false;" value="Buy Now" name="AddToCart_Submit" class="productSubmitInput">
    <div class="wish"><a href="/FavoriteProcess.aspx?OID=4723290&amp;OTYPE=27" class="favoritelink">Add to Wishlist</a></div>
    </div>
    <div class="product-description">
    <h4>Product Information:</h4>
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.  Aenean
    commodo ligula eget dolor.  Aenean massa.  Cum sociis natoque penatibus
     </div>
    </div>
    <!-- End Main -->
    </div>
    <!-- End Product Details -->
</td>

I must add that I try to wait during debug and with

Manage().Timeouts().ImplicitlyWait

but nothing. This happens on other places also. I using Firefox for tests

Answer 1

You are running into dynamic attributes.

My first recommendation to you. Switch to CSS.

My second recommendation, instead of boiling down into an entire parent-child hierarchy, why don't you just KISS!

So, lets look at your issue. You are trying to fetch the product name. Easy.. we can use classes here.

css=td.productItem h2.product-name

voila, it was that easy to fetch.. instead of having this huge ugly xpath selector, we've simplified it to a css selector.

So onto the next problem, if we have multiple of td.productItem's on the page, we can use a couple things.

Try,

css=td.productItem:nth-child(1) h2.productName

That will select the first td with class, productItem.

note: you may need to specify the td's parent.. e.g. css=div#container td.productItem:nth-child(1)

More specifics...

The reason your xpath is failing, is because of that catProdTd_4723290 id assigned to the <td> element being generated automatically, rendering that element unselectable. You can work around that, by doing starts with. for example, with css -

css=td[id^='catProdTd']

will select that <td> take note though, that there might be more than 1 element selected.

Answer 2

I suggest using such a method for waiting:

 public bool boolWaitForElementIsDisplayed(By locator, int secondsToWait)
    {

        WebDriverWait Wait = new WebDriverWait(Driver, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(secondsToWait));

        try
        {
            var FoundElement = Wait.Until<Boolean>(d =>
            {
                try
                {
                    return (d.FindElement(locator).Displayed && d.FindElement(locator).Enabled);
                }
                catch
                {
                    return false;
                }
            });
        }
        catch (WebDriverTimeoutException)
        {
            return false;
        }
        return true;
    }

and then check as follows:

IWebElement h2Element = null;

string xpath = "//td[contains(@class,'productItem')]/div/div[contains(@class,'product-main')]/h2";
if (boolWaitForElementIsDisplayed(By.XPath(xpath), 30))
    h2Element = Driver.FindElement(xpath);

Answer 3

So, the problem was that page isn't loaded. Why? Because WebElement.Click() not works. Why Click not working?! I don't know. I resolved problem with clicks using JavascriptExecutor:

IJavaScriptExecutor executor = (IJavaScriptExecutor)chauffeur;
IWebElement webel1 = chauffeur.FindElement(By.CssSelector("#nav ul:nth-child(1) li:nth-child(2) a[href='/products']")); 

Instead of using

webel1.Click(); 

which not works, I used:

executor.ExecuteScript("arguments[0].click();", webel1);