Identifying a page element for Selenium automation

Question

I have a Application Under Test that has a tabular structure like below:

<table width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" style="background-color: White">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td id="lefthandcol" class="b24-lefthandcol" valign="top" style="width: 130px !important">
<td style="height: 400px; width: 5px">
<td style="height: 400px; width: 5px">
<td valign="top">
<div id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_MiddlePanel">
<div id="DestinationDiv"></div>
<table>
</td>
<td style="height: 400px; width: 5px">
<td style="height: 400px; width: 5px">
<td width="225" valign="top" align="right" style="background-color: White;">
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

The question is how do I identify this table since it doesn't have id ?

What is generally people do in such scenario?

Answer 1

You should find any unique parent-children relationship and write it with the help of CSS or Xpath:

IWebElement table = driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//table[descendant::*[@id='ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_MiddlePanel']]"));

So the table with descendant element with id=ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_MiddlePanel will be found.

Answer 2

如果id不可用，则可以使用xpath或css。如果无法自己编写它们，则可以使用firebug和xpath checker之类的工具。