Selenium Selectors XPath or CSS which one is your favourite?

Hey Guys,

If you people have ever written any selenium scripts, you must be aware of XPath and CSS selectors. They are the most used selectors in Selenium especially XPath. There are other selectors like ID,Class Name, Name, Link Text though exist and you can use them but XPath and CSS gives you an edge while finding an element in  complex HTML structure. Ok so which one is better? XPath or CSS????

In my experience so far, I have used XPath selectors/locators in selenium but in recent times they are my last options to use, Yes I mean, I prefer CSS before XPath. Reason is very simple, XPath is slow. I do write all my tests for IE browser and IE does not support XPath natively and it is damn slow in IE. But as I said, It is my last option that mean, i know when no other selectors finds me an element, XPath is the saviour.

Here I am posting a video by Sauce which is showing  a comparison between XPath and CSS, a really nice video to watch.

Watch the video, and share your experiences with XPath and CSS selectors in Selenium also. Please give your valuable comments to improve the blog. 

Thanks!!

Handling Alerts in Selenium/WebDriver

Hello All,

It has been a long long time, when i wrote something for you guys on my blog. Got some time to write something, so today it will be related to handling alerts in selenium/webdriver.This post is written keeping Selenium 2.0 in my mind. So it may not hold good for Selenium RC users.

Selenium can handle  java script alerts in a very effective manner but it can not handle modal alert box which gets created by OS itself e.g.:  java script error message alert. Now how do you handle these java script alerts, what can you do with those alerts, lets see one by one with the code.

Let us take a Scenario as an example -:
 Select a object from the page, Click on Delete button. It triggers a alert saying "Object is going to be deleted from the database, Click OK to Confirm or Cancel to Cancel the Operation".

We need to test the message of the Alert, Clicking Ok and Clicking Cancel also.
Steps to be Performed
=========================
Select the Object to delete from the page.
Click on Delete button, it triggers the Alert message.




/* Code to switch the control to Alert message*/
Alert testAlrt=driver.switchTo().alert();
testAlrt is the Controlling object of the Alert. Now you can use this object to Accept/get Text/Dismiss the alert.

/* To get the text from the alert */
String sAltText=testAlrt.getText();

/* To Accept any alert, it means Clicking OK button */
testAlrt.accept();

/* To dismiss any alert, It means Clicking Cancel button */
testAlrt.dismiss();

/* If the Alerts gets created using Ajax call, then you may need to wait till the Alert present */
WebDriverWait wdWait= new WebDriverWait(driver, 10);
wdWait.until(ExpectedConditions.alertIsPresent());


This is all about handling Alerts in your Selenium test scripts. Please give back a feedback about the post.

Thanks!!