[java] Webdriver findElements By xpath

1)I am doing a tutorial to show how findElements By xpath works. I would like to know why it returns all the texts that following the <div> element with attribute id=container.

code for xpath: By.xpath("//div[@id='container']

2) how should I modify the code so it just return first or first few nodes that follow the parent note e.g. first node like 'Home', first few node like, Home, Manual Testing and Automation Testing.

Thanks for your advise and help!

Here is the code fragment for this tutorial:

import java.util.List;

import org.junit.Test;
import org.junit.Before;
import org.junit.After;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;

public class WD_findElements 
{
    @Test
    public void test_byxpath(){

        WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

        try{
            driver.get("http://www.hexbytes.com");

        List<WebElement> elements = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//div[@id='container']"));    
            System.out.println("Test7 number of elements: " + elements.size());

            for(WebElement ele : elements){
                //ele.sendKeys("hexbyes");
                System.out.println(ele.getText());
                //System.out.println(ele.getAttribute("id"));
                //System.out.println(ele.getTagName());
            } 
        }
        finally {
            driver.close();
        }

    }//end of test_byxpath

 public void xpathDemo2() {
           WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
           try{
               driver.get("http://www.hexbytes.com");
               WebElement webelement = driver.findElement(By.id("container"));
               //matching single element with attribute value=container
               System.out.println("The id value is: " + webelement.getAttribute("id"));
               System.out.println("The tag name is: " + webelement.getTagName());
           }
           finally {
               driver.close();
           }
       }//end of xpathDemo2 

public void xpathDemo3() {
       WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
       try{
           driver.get("http://www.hexbytes.com");
          //find first child node of div element with attribute=container
          List<WebElement> elements = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//div[@id='container']/*[1]"));
          System.out.println("Test1 number of elements: " + elements.size()); 

          for(WebElement ele : elements){
              System.out.println(ele.getTagName());
              System.out.println(ele.getAttribute("id"));
              System.out.println("");
              System.out.println("");
          }
   }
   finally {
       driver.close();
   }
 }//end of xpathDemo3
 }

The XPath turns into this:

Get me all of the div elements that have an id equal to container.

As for getting the first etc, you have two options.

Turn it into a .findElement() - this will just return the first one for you anyway.

or

To explicitly do this in XPath, you'd be looking at:

(//div[@id='container'])[1]

for the first one, for the second etc:

(//div[@id='container'])[2]

Then XPath has a special indexer, called last, which would (you guessed it) get you the last element found:

(//div[@id='container'])[last()]

Worth mentioning that XPath indexers will start from 1 not 0 like they do in most programming languages.

As for getting the parent 'node', well, you can use parent:

//div[@id='container']/parent::*

That would get the div's direct parent.

You could then go further and say I want the first *div* with an id of container, and I want his parent:

(//div[@id='container'])[1]/parent::*

Hope that helps!

Instead of

css=#container

use

css=div.container:nth-of-type(1),css=div.container:nth-of-type(2)