When to use xpath and why?

[Magus]

From my own working experience and tons of articles on internet, "xpath" seem like a bad stuff that everyone should avoid using it.

But I think "xpath" must be a reasonable stuff in web test automation, or it must be already removed from the API.

I want to know that under what kind of situation, using xpath is better than ID, css selector, etc...

Can someone show me an example?

Thank you very much.

[Jakub Siberski]

When you have static parent but dynamic content? Then you have your constant root, and you can find dynamically created children by xpath. 

Think about something like newsfeed. You have constant div where items will be inserted, but items themselves may have different order and different content. 

Additionally you may not have control over some of items generated. There can lots of different difficulties there.

I wouldn't say that xpath is better that other selectors. I would say it is last resort when dealing with dynamic content.

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Pozdrawiam
Jakub Siberski

[Ross Patterson]

XPath is a tool.  Every tool has purposes it’s useful for, and purposes for which it is commonly misused.  Lock picks allow locksmiths to let you in when you left your keys in the coat you lent to the pretty girl in a strapless dress on a cold winter evening (trust me), but they also allow people to break in to your house and steal your TV.  Part of being a professional is being able to judge which of the many tools in your toolkit are appropriate for the task at hand.  I own a variety of hammers, because a baby sledge makes a poor (but satisfying!) tack hammer, and a drywall hammer is does a nice job of dimpling wallboard so the nails can be hidden.

 

XPath selectors can climb back up the tree, with its “/../” construct, something most other selectors (including CSS) can’t.  They can include Boolean logic within predicates (e.g., “[@x=’y’ or @a=’b’]”), which is also unusual (although CSS can do it for limited combinations).  They can reference the content of an element (e.g., via the “text()” and “.” constructs), which real CSS can’t (although some JavaScript CSS libraries can help).  The list goes on and on.

 

Ross

[Tarun Kumar]

Nice analogy

[Magus]

Thank you Ross.