Xpath from the current node using firefox webdriver in java

Question

So i'm facing a small perforemence issue while using findElement(By.xpath("..."))

First i'm locating a ul element that contains around 20 li child. by using then on each of the child i'm locating the inner xpath to the information by using the following:

List<WebElement> addrBookNames = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//ul[@class='displayAddressUL']"));
for(WebElement addr : addrBookNames)
{
    String fullName = addr.findElement(By.xpath("li[@class='AddressFullName']/b")).getText();
    String addressLine = addr.findElement(By.xpath("li[@class='AddressAddressLine']")).getText();
    String city = addr.findElement(By.xpath("li[@class='AddressCity']")).getText();
    String county = addr.findElement(By.xpath("li[@class='country']")).getText();
    String phoneNumber = addr.findElement(By.xpath("li[@class='phone']")).getText();

}

The above code takes around 5 sec, checked it by using :

double stime = System.currentTimeMillis();
double TotalTime = System.currentTimeMillis() - stime;

before and after.

Is there anything wrong with the way i'm extracting the inner xpaths from the selected node?

Time is depends on route that how many elements it need to route to find specific. so your mentioed time looks reasonable. — Helping Hands, Feb 27 '15 at 11:22
The webdriver dose not have any hash data structure for each element ? which then it should be O(1) per search? — USer22999299, Feb 27 '15 at 11:26

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:06

1) I would try as alternative CSS selector approach and create 5 WebElement Lists ( already in split representation for searched fields):

List<WebElement> fullNames = driver.findELements(By.cssSelector("ul.displayAddressUL li.AddressFullName>b"));
List<WebElement> addressLines= driver.findELements(By.cssSelector("ul.displayAddressUL li.AddressAddressLine"));
List<WebElement> cities= driver.findELements(By.cssSelector("ul.displayAddressUL li.AddressCity"));
List<WebElement> countries=driver.findELements(By.cssSelector("ul.displayAddressUL li.country"));
List<WebElement> phoneNums=driver.findELements(By.cssSelector("ul.displayAddressUL li.phone"));

for (int i=0;i<fullNames.size(); i++){
String fullName= fullNames.get(i).getText();
String addressLine =addressLines.get(i).getText();
String city = cities.get(i).getText();
String county = countries.get(i).getText();
String phoneNumber = phoneNums.get(i).getText();
}

Also I'd like to add: CSS selectors perform far better than Xpath and it is well documented in Selenium community. Here are some reasons,

Xpath engines are different in each browser, hence make them inconsistent
IE does not have a native xpath engine, therefore selenium injects its own xpath engine for compatibility of its API. Hence we lose the advantage of using native browser features that WebDriver inherently promotes.
Xpath tend to become complex and hence make hard to read in my opinion However there are some situations where, you need to use xpath, for example, searching for a parent element or searching element by its text (I wouldn't recommend the later).

More details on performance comparison you can get here

2) another alternative approach that I would recommend as mentioned here try to use HtmlUnitDriver, that will definitely increase your performance; OR: to use pure js wrapped by Javascipt executor for text extraction like:

 String elem_css_selector="blablabla...";
 JavascriptExecutor js = (JavascriptExecutor) driver;
        StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();

stringBuilder.append("var x = $(\""+elem_css_selector+"\");");
        stringBuilder.append("return x.text().toString();")       ;


       String resultingText= (String) js.executeScript(stringBuilder.toString());
       Assert.assertTrue(resultingText.trim().equals("Expected Text")   );

Xpath from the current node using firefox webdriver in java

1 Answers1