Locating child nodes of WebElements in selenium

Question

I am using selenium to test my web application and I can successfully find tags using By xpath  However now and then I need to find child nodes within that node   Example    lt div id  a  gt       lt div gt           lt span   gt           lt input   gt       lt  div gt   lt  div gt    I can do   WebElement divA   driver findElement  By xpath     div  id  a          But now I need to find the input  so I could do   driver findElement  By xpath     div  id  a    input        However  at that point in code I only have divA  not its xpath anymore    I would like to do something like this   WebElement input   driver findElement  divA  By xpath     input         But such a function does not exist  Can I do this anyhow   BTW  Sometimes I need to find a  lt div gt  that has a certain decendent node  How can I ask in xpath for  the  lt div gt  that contains a  lt span gt  with the text  hello world

User · Answer

The toString   method of Selenium s By-Class produces something like  By xpath    XpathFoo   So you could take a substring starting at the colon with something like this   String selector   divA toString   substring s indexOf        2     With this  you could find your element inside your other element with this   WebElement input   driver findElement  By xpath  selector      input         Advantage  You have to search only once on the actual SUT  so it could give you a bonus in performance   Disadvantage  Ugly    if you want to search for the parent element with css selectory and use xpath for it s childs  you have to check for types before you concatenate    In this case  Slanec s solution  using findElement on a WebElement  is much better

User · Answer

If you have to wait there is a method presenceOfNestedElementLocatedBy that takes the  parent  element and a locator  e g  a By xpath   WebElement subNode   new WebDriverWait driver 10  until      ExpectedConditions presenceOfNestedElementLocatedBy          divA  By xpath     div span

User · Answer

For Finding All the ChildNodes you can use the below Snippet   List lt WebElement gt  childs   MyCurrentWebElement findElements By xpath    child                 for  WebElement e    childs                        System out println e getTagName                 Note that this will give all the Child Nodes at same level -  Like if you have structure like this     lt Html gt    lt body gt     lt div gt  ---suppose this is current WebElement      lt a gt      lt a gt         lt img gt             lt a gt         lt img gt      lt a gt    It will give me tag names of 3 anchor tags here only   If you want all the child Elements recursively   you can replace the above code with  MyCurrentWebElement findElements By xpath             Hope That Helps

User · Answer

According to JavaDocs  you can do this   WebElement input   divA findElement By xpath     input            How can I ask in xpath for  the div-tag that contains a span with the   text  hello world      WebElement elem   driver findElement By xpath    div span text    hello world          The XPath spec is a suprisingly good read on this

User · Answer

I also found myself in a similar position a couple of weeks ago  You can also do this by creating a custom ElementLocatorFactory  or simply passing in divA into the DefaultElementLocatorFactory  to see if it s a child of the first div - you would then call the appropriate PageFactory initElements method   In this case if you did the following   PageFactory initElements new DefaultElementLocatorFactory divA   pageObjectInstance       The Page Object instance would then need a WebElement     annotated with something like the xpath above or  FindBy tagName    input

[java] Locating child nodes of WebElements in selenium

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