Storing locators of web elements: public static final String or Enum?

[T.J. Maher]

Greetings! I wanted to get people's opinion on how people tend to store locators and global variables such as a username or password:

Let's say you had a login page at a website, such as Dave Haeffner's test site, https://the-internet.herokuapp.com/login. 

The three main web elements you may want to select for, are:

• Username textbox: id = username // username is tomsmith
  
• Password textbox: id= password // password is SuperSecretPassword!
  
• Login Button: cssSelector is [type='submit'][class='radius']
  

If you were using Selenium / Java and a Page Object, for instance, LoginPage.java, how would you best store the locators? Or the username and password global variables? 

Would you store the global variables in:

• public static final String userName = "tomsmith"?
• public static final String password = "SuperSecretPassword!"?

I have also seen it as:

public enum UserEnum {

    TOM_SMITH("tomsmith","SuperSecretPassword!");

    String userName;
    String password;

    private UserEnum(String UserName, String Password){
        this.userName=UserName;
        this.password=Password;
    }

    public String getUserName(){
        return userName;
    }

    public String getPassword(){
        return password;

}

And for storing the locators, in  LoginPage.java I have in the bottom of the class:

public enum LoginPageEnum {

    USERNAME("[name='username']"),
    PASSWORD("[name='password']"),
    LOGIN_BUTTON("[type='submit'][class='radius']");

    String id;

    private LoginPageEnum(String Id){
        this.id = Id;
    }

    public String getId(){
        return id;
    }

    public By selector() {
        return By.cssSelector(getId());

... How have you done it? I was just trying to compare notes, and figuring out the pros and cons of one test philosophy over another. 

Right now, I am at the stage of learning that I am just ridiculously happy simply when the test runs! 

- T.J. Maher

  Sr. QA Engineer, Fitbit

  tjmaher.com

  // 15+ yrs manual tester, Automation Engineer for [ 3 ] months and counting

[Shawn McCarthy]

If the username/password are always the same, I would store them in the Login page object. However, they can are different for all the different tests, I would store them in the Tests themselves, and pass them into the page object from my test.

As for the locators, I store them (usually) as private Bys in my page object. Sometimes when I need a dynamic locator (like if I were using nth-child or something, which I don't use anymore since it won't work with IE8), I might store the locator as a String with the prefix or suffix of the type of locator it represents (css, xpath, etc). Than in my method that uses that locator, I can easily modify it to include the integer for nth-child.

Hope this helps! And this is just my way of doing it, not necessarily the best.