Selenium e2e tests, be more specific

Question

I am using Selenium WebDriver and Protractor to run e2e tests on my angular project. I am having a lot of trouble finding a detailed API that will help me understand how to use the driver. My specific problem is as follows:

I have two controllers on one page, a login controller, and a register controller. They both have an input bound to user.username. To test login, I use the code:

element(select.model('user.username')).sendKeys('nathanadmin');

And I get the warning: warning:

more than one element found for locator by.model("user.username")- you may need to be more specific

Which isn't a problem until I try to test register, in which case I don't know how to tell it to select the second 'user.username' input.

I tried looking through this page: https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/master/docs/api.md

And this page: http://docs.seleniumhq.org/docs/03_webdriver.jsp

But I can't seem to find a more comprehensive API with a simple explanation of how to do more complex "selecting".

EDIT:

I think something like this would be helpful:

element(select.model('user.username').first()).sendKeys('nathanadmin');

What I came up with was:

element.all(select.model('user.username')).then(function(elements) { elements[0].sendKeys('nathanadmin'); });

But this still does not help me, since I am looking for a more in-depth documentation for webdriver.

Answer 1

you could try using something like

 ptor.findElements(protractor.By.model('user.username')).then(function(models){
    models[0].sendKeys('nathanadmin');
    models[1].sendKeys('secondstring');
  });

not sure if thats strictly correct but it wont be far off, basically using findElements gets all elements with the same identifier and saves them as an array. i have something like this in my tests which works

 visibleFilters.findElements(protractor.By.className('dropdown')).then(function(dropdowns){
      dropdowns[2].findElement(protractor.By.id(filterID)).click();

hope this helps

EDIT: the reason in the code from my test i have findElement is because i need to go deeper to get the exact element im looking for but i could have just done .click()

ANOTHER EDIT: as for more detailed documentation, this is a problem with protractor but its purely because the team have focused on getting it up and running adding new features/fixing bugs etc, i must say though most information that i have wanted i have found either on here or on github Julie (not sure of second name, is a protractor information godess) and regularly posts on here and github helping people out, which has been enough for me

Answer 2

select.model('user.username') is just one method of "locating" an element in the DOM, a Protractor-specific method. WebDriver has a number of locator strategies which you may find more flexible and, in your case, more specific.

This section of the Protractor spec illustrates the locator mechanisms made available to you: https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/master/docs/api.md#locator-strategies

Consider one of these alternative strategies to isolate a single input element: element(by.id('username')).sendKeys('nathanadmin'); element(by.css('#username')).sendKeys('nathanadmin');