Re: getText() from a disabled element (java)

[MartinP]

Found a solution:  getAttribute("innerHTML") does the job!

Any other/better options for getting the text from disabled elements?




On Monday, September 10, 2012 12:50:02 PM UTC+1, MartinP wrote:

Hi all, I'm sure there must be a simple way to do this, but I've not managed to find it.

I want to get the text out of an element (an h3 heading) that is not currently displayed on the page, but is in the html. 
I've got the WebElement object representing the element (I'm using Java), but calling getText() only returns visible text, and as the entire element is not visible, I get nothing back.

Any thoughts?

Martin.

[SantoshSarma]

Hi Martin..!

Have you tried with getAttribute("value"); ?

Regards,

SantoshSarma

[MartinP]

I did read about getAttribute("value") and gave it a try, but it returned null for me unfortunately.

[Peter Gale]

That'll could be because it is disabled.

Why do you need to get the text of a disabled element, Martin?

---

Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2012 06:03:57 -0700
From: martin.ph...@gmail.com
To: seleniu...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [selenium-users] Re: getText() from a disabled element (java)

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[MartinP]

I admit it's a bit of a weird case, but I'm not actually testing the web-page itself, I'm testing the AppServer that displays the web page - the web page being the App Server's self diagnostic page.

The page I'm accessing has about 6 expandable sections in it, each section has a number of Status entries (75 in total at the moment).  I'm checking that all Status entries are 'good', and if any aren't I want to get the content out of them. As all the Status entries load themselves during the page load, and they are all accessible by getting Elements with a specific class, so I can access all Statuses without caring if they are displayed or not, and without having to navigate through the page to get them to be displayed.

e.g.

        List<WebElement> statusElements = driver.getAllByClassName(status);
        List<WebElement> goodElements = driver.getAllByClassName(good);

        //Removing good elements from the list of all statuses
        statusElements.removeAll(goodElements);

        for (WebElement nonGoodElem : statusElements) {
            // The 'heading' for the status is in am h3 within the status div
            String heading = nonGoodElem.findElement(By.xpath(".//h3")).getAttribute("innerHTML");
            log("non-good Status  = " + heading);
        }

<div class="status good">
<h3>PHP</h3>
<p> You have PHP version 5.3.2-1ubuntu4.17.</p>
</div>
<div class="status bad">
<h3>Clean URLs</h3>
<p> Request rewriting does not appear to be working correctly. Please verify your web server's request rewriting configuration and try again. For Apache, ensure the mod_rewrite module is enabled.</p>
</div>

(Fingers crossed the formatting works OK for this!)

[Peter Gale]

If it is quicker to check against the disabled elements than enable them separately and then check, and if you're happy that the hidden values you're getting with the innerHTML option are the right ones then it sounds like a reasonable approach and probably as quick a way as you'll get for what you want to do.

---

Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2012 06:25:32 -0700
From: martin.ph...@gmail.com
To: seleniu...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [selenium-users] Re: getText() from a disabled element (java)

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/selenium-users/-/Yf_tdkjMuWcJ.

[MartinP]

Many thanks for the confirmation.  Wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious! :-)

[David]

Also, just wanted to mention that if you don't want or need the HTML and just want text, then can also try attribute "innerText".

[MartinP]

That's great David - thanks, that's a much better one for me to use.  Do you know if there a list somewhere of all of these built in 'attributes'?

[David]

I don't know where one might find a comprehensive list, but here's one:

http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/dom_obj_all.asp

though for some reason it doesn't list innerText. Another option is to search HTMLElement attributes or DOM attributes to see what list you can pull up. And most of these are DOM based attributes and will only be accessible from WebDriver and not Selenium RC, or at least from RC, you have to get them off the browserbot object and not from native RC getAttribute() method.