How to combine Selenium Locators

[Jerry Jaskierny]

I keep a library of all the Selenium locators in an application I
frequently test. Sometimes, I would like to reference an element on
the DOM that doesn't already exist in the library...but a parent for
the element already exists. A contrived example might be something
like...

// This would be in the library.
By resultListElement = By.xpath("/html/body/div[@class='header']/
div[@class='menu']/ul");


// This would be in another class, but it produces the
// string "By.xpath: By.xpath: /html/body/div[@class='header']/
div[@class='menu']/ul/li[1]".
WebElement firstResultInList = driver.resultListElement + "/li[1]";


Unfortunately, because By.toString() has been overridden, this is not
possible. So I'm currently forced to reduplicate existing locators.
Any suggestions on this?

[Luke Inman-Semerau]

This sounds kind of weird... Do you have a predefined set of static By's or something?

If you already have the WebElement from the original By, you can find other elements based off that element:

WebElement unorderedList = driver.findElementBy(By.xpath("//div[@class='header']/div[@class='menu']/ul"));

WebElement firstListItem = unorderedList.findElementBy(By.tagName("li"));  (or By.xpath, By.css, etc.)

-Luke

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[Jerry Jaskierny]

Yep. It cuts down on a tremendous amount of work of creating initial
Xpath expressions and it's less error-prone when creating tests.

This isn't as convenient as I was hoping for, but it matches my
description. Thanks Luke!

[Luke Inman-Semerau]

Ah, you guys didn't choose to keep the XPaths in a property file or static strings? ~ could have done what you wanted there and then just manipulated the string as you want.

Personally that's not how my tests are organized... if there's a common component on the pages, then we'll have a static method or helper utility to get that element / validate it.

Good luck either way :)