How to get locator of current web element?

Question

The requirement is to get locator(By) of current web element.

For my project, I'm implimenting custom elements. So for a an HTML select element, there would be a class SelectElement and for an HTML option element, there would be class OptionElement.

To implement custom elements, I am using CustomWebElement class from this repository: https://github.com/JulHorn/java_selenium_custom_elements

I would like to retrieve selectElementInstance.getOptions() which should kind of return List<OptionElement>and not List<WebElement>.

So here is what I'm trying to do:

1) I am getting List<WebElement> using findElements(...) method.

2) In this list, I am iterating the element one by one.

3) Whichever WebElement i get, i want to retrieve instance of By for this element.

4) With By instance in hand and WebDriver instance already present, I can create custom element by using the constructor super(WebDriver driver, By by).

Below i have gave my code sample:

List<WebElement> myList = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//select[@id ='abcd']/*"));
ListIterator<WebElement> simpleChildIterator = myList.listIterator();
List<OptionElement> options = new ArrayList<OptionElement>();
while(simpleChildIterator.hasNext())
{
    By l = simpleChildIterator.next().getBy();//I want locator for same element
    //Here I can now create Instance of OptionElement to add to List<OptionElement>
    OptionElement o = new OptionElement(driver, l);
    options.add(o);
}

Please note that when I use OptionElement extends CustomWebElement implementation in Page Object in lines with PageFactory, the following works absolutely fine for me.

@findBy(xpath = "//select[@id ='abcd']/*")
List<OptionElement> options;

But this works because of PageFactory's magic that gets involved through its initElements() call.

I want the same to work without PageFactory's involvement when I am willing to define a new method List<OptionElement> getOptions() on my SelectElementclass.

I hope the question is clear now that I have made several edits.

Thanks to @Muzzamil for suggesting WebDriver should be singleton. I have removed that from my question. Also thanks to @Pranav to exemplify my issue with select and option elements. It is a better example to explain.

Answer 1

So basically you need By element from webElement. You can try this:

private By getByFromElement(WebElement element) {

    By by = null;
    String[] selectorWithValue= (element.toString().split("->")[1].replaceFirst("(?s)(.*)\\]", "$1" + "")).split(":");

    String selector = selectorWithValue[0].trim();
    String value = selectorWithValue[1].trim();

    switch (selector) {
        case "id":
            by = By.id(value);
            break;
        case "className":
            by = By.className(value);
            break;
        case "tagName":
            by = By.tagName(value);
            break;
        case "xpath":
            by = By.xpath(value);
            break;
        case "cssSelector":
            by = By.cssSelector(value);
            break;
        case "linkText":
            by = By.linkText(value);
            break;
        case "name":
            by = By.name(value);
            break;
        case "partialLinkText":
            by = By.partialLinkText(value);
            break;
        default:
            throw new IllegalStateException("locator : " + selector + " not found!!!");
    }
    return by;
}

Answer 2

Ok, so here is VERY dirty solution - please DO NOT use this in production but just as an idea for your specific question: So, first you can create class for the web driver:

public class WebDr {

    private ChromeDriver driver;

    public WebDr(ChromeDriver driver) {
        this.driver = driver;
    }

    public void get(final String url) {
        this.driver.get(url);
    }

    public WebEl getElem(By by) {
        return new WebEl(driver.findElement(by), this.driver);
    }
}

Also, here is class for WebElement:

public class WebEl {

    private WebElement elem;
    private WebDriver driver;

    public WebEl(WebElement elem, WebDriver driver) {
        this.elem = elem;
        this.driver = driver;
    }

    public WebDriver getDriver() {
        return this.driver;
    }
}

Finally in your code you can do similar to:

public class MainCl {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\***\\chromedriver.exe");
        WebDr driver = new WebDr(new ChromeDriver());

        driver.get("https://www.google.com/");


        Thread.sleep(5000);
        WebEl myElem = driver.getElem(By.name("q"));
        System.out.println(myElem.getDriver());

    }
}

And, of course, the same can be done for list of WebEl.