Unable to locate an element in Selenium

Question

<div id="ColumnMask">
    <div id="MiddleColumnPositioner">
        <div id="LeftColumnPositioner">
            <div id="MiddleColumnWrapper">
                <div id="MiddleColumn">
                    <div class="bdrBottom">
                        <div class="pad">
                            <h2>Account Information</h2>
                            <br/>
                            <div class="padLeft padRight">
                            </div>
                        </div>
                        <!-- MiddleColumn -->
                    </div>
                    <!-- MiddleColumnWrapper -->

Hi. I'm trying to locate tag and surprisingly nothing works. Here are my examples:

public IWebElement AccountInfoTitle() 
{ 
    return Driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//*[@id='MiddleColumn']/div[2]/h2[contains(.,'Account Information')]")); 
}

public IWebElement AccountInfoTitle() 
{ 
    return Driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//h2 [contains(.,'Account Information')]")); 
}

Do you have any idea why? It looks correct to me.

But If I'm moving the quotes (putting them like this ['@id=MiddleColumn']) it works perfect, but I'm assuming that in this case Selenium kind of confused and not even validate it, therefore it's passing the test. Here is the example:

public IWebElement AccountInfoTitle() 
{ 
    return Driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//*['@id=MiddleColumn']/div['h2=Account Information']")); 
}

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Not a complete answer, but part of it: the XPath

//*[@id='MiddleColumn']/div[2]/h2[contains(.,'Account Information')]

doesn't return anything for your input as this is a misunderstanding - div[2] selects the second direct child div of the element with @id='MiddleColumn' which does not exist.

One correct XPath for your input is

//*[@id='MiddleColumn']/div/div/h2[contains(.,'Account Information')]

For illustration - the XPath //*[@id='MiddleColumn']/div[2]/h2 works in case your input would look like this (relevant part):

<div id="MiddleColumn">
  <div class="bdrBottom>Example</div>  //div[1] 
  <div class="pad">                    //div[2]                  
      <h2>Account Information</h2>

For the second XPath that should work

 //h2[contains(.,'Account Information')]

an XPath expression tester returned the correct result, but I'm unsure if the space that you have after h2 - //h2 [contains(.,'Account Information')] - could cause Selenium to fail.

Answer 2

You might want to change the AccountInfoTitle method into:

public IWebElement AccountInfoTitle() 
{ 
    return Driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//h2[contains(text(),'Account Information')]")); 
}

Answer 3

Try this xpath:

//div[@class='pad']/h2[.='Account Information']

The above will locate the 'h2' element with exact innerHTML/text as 'Account Information' under a 'div' element with class attribute as 'pad' .

Answer 4

i think the best practices to locate an element contain String as the following:

-retrun all element using class name or id
in java we can use FindElements or FindElement i'm not sure but i think the same in c#

public IWebElements getMyElement(){
return Driver.FindElements(By.cssSelector(".pad");
}

and you can find your element by using for loop :

    public IWebElement getElementContainString(String expectedString){
     for(int i=0; i<getMyElement().size(); i++){
    IWebElement element = getMyElement().get(i).getText().toString();
    if(element.contain(expectedString){
    return getMyElement().get(i);
    breack;
    }

}