Element Location Using XPath Axis

During testing we will sometimes come up to situations where developers are not following best practises for testability . We will frequently come up situations where elements doesn’t have any unique identifiable property. XPath axis comes to help in those situations. We can identify elements using various XPath Properties

List of various XPath Axis are available in https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/XPath/Axes If you have well-defined properties to identify the element, use them as your locator. Please read  locator strategy  Using XPath and Other Parameters

Below are major one’s which we will frequently use

1. ancestor

This selects all ancestors of current node. That will include parent, grand parents etc Eg :

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 //td[text()='Product Desc']/ancestor::tr

2. descendant

This selects all children of current node. That will include child, grand child etc Eg:

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/table/descendant::td/input

3. followingis

Th selects everything after the closing tag of current node Eg:

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//td[text()='Product Desc']/following::tr

4. following-sibling

This selects all siblings after the closing tah of current node. Eg:

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//td[text()='Product Desc']/followingsibling::td

5. preceding

This selects everything prior to current node Eg:

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 //td[text()='Add to cart']/preceding::tr
  1. preceding-sibling

This selects all siblings prior to current node Eg:

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//td[text()='Add to cart']/precedingsibling::td

7. child

This selects all children of current node

8. parent

This select parent of current node

As usual , you can always use combinations of above in your test. Statements can be constructed in the same way as we traverse the XPath axis

Last , but not least… we can also use regular expression in XPath.

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