Locating child nodes of WebElements in selenium

Asked 9/5, 2012 at 16:31 Answered 20/7, 2016 at 17:25

I am using selenium to test my web application and I can successfully find tags using By.xpath. However now and then I need to find child nodes within that node.

Example:

<div id="a">
    <div>
        <span />
        <input />
    </div>
</div>

I can do:

WebElement divA = driver.findElement( By.xpath( "//div[@id='a']" ) )

But now I need to find the input, so I could do:

driver.findElement( By.xpath( "//div[@id='a']//input" ) )

However, at that point in code I only have divA, not its xpath anymore... I would like to do something like this:

WebElement input = driver.findElement( divA, By.xpath( "//input" ) );

But such a function does not exist. Can I do this anyhow?

BTW: Sometimes I need to find a <div> that has a certain decendent node. How can I ask in xpath for "the <div> that contains a <span> with the text 'hello world'"?

Penna answered 9/5, 2012 at 16:31 Comment(0)

According to JavaDocs, you can do this:

WebElement input = divA.findElement(By.xpath(".//input"));

How can I ask in xpath for "the div-tag that contains a span with the text 'hello world'"?

WebElement elem = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[span[text()='hello world']]"));

The XPath spec is a suprisingly good read on this.

Hexameter answered 9/5, 2012 at 17:44 Comment(3)

Thanks a lot. I did not know yet, that i could use xpaths within [] inside xpaths... – Penna 10/5, 2012 at 7:9

the latest version of the XPath spec can be found here – Triliteral 13/10, 2016 at 15:43

just beautiful! – Gubernatorial 18/1, 2018 at 22:1

If you have to wait there is a method presenceOfNestedElementLocatedBy that takes the "parent" element and a locator, e.g. a By.xpath:

WebElement subNode = new WebDriverWait(driver,10).until(
    ExpectedConditions.presenceOfNestedElementLocatedBy(
        divA, By.xpath(".//div/span")
    )
);

Reproval answered 20/7, 2016 at 17:25 Comment(1)

exactly what I was searching for in a completely other context. Thx. – Valeta 28/3, 2019 at 16:37

For Finding All the ChildNodes you can use the below Snippet

List<WebElement> childs = MyCurrentWebElement.findElements(By.xpath("./child::*"));

        for (WebElement e  : childs)
        {
            System.out.println(e.getTagName());
        }

Note that this will give all the Child Nodes at same level -> Like if you have structure like this :

<Html> 
<body> 
 <div> ---suppose this is current WebElement 
   <a>
   <a>
      <img>
          <a>
      <img>
   <a>

It will give me tag names of 3 anchor tags here only . If you want all the child Elements recursively , you can replace the above code with MyCurrentWebElement.findElements(By.xpath(".//*"));

Hope That Helps !!

Buckner answered 14/5, 2015 at 19:40 Comment(2)

This actually worked. I don't know why someone gave it -1. Thanks mate for still keeping it. – Armyworm 27/5, 2020 at 2:29

Glad to see it was useful for someone – Buckner 1/6, 2020 at 18:37

I also found myself in a similar position a couple of weeks ago. You can also do this by creating a custom ElementLocatorFactory (or simply passing in divA into the DefaultElementLocatorFactory) to see if it's a child of the first div - you would then call the appropriate PageFactory initElements method.

In this case if you did the following:

PageFactory.initElements(new DefaultElementLocatorFactory(divA), pageObjectInstance));
// The Page Object instance would then need a WebElement 
// annotated with something like the xpath above or @FindBy(tagName = "input")

Marylouisemaryly answered 9/5, 2012 at 18:17 Comment(0)

-1

The toString() method of Selenium's By-Class produces something like "By.xpath: //XpathFoo"

So you could take a substring starting at the colon with something like this:

String selector = divA.toString().substring(s.indexOf(":") + 2);

With this, you could find your element inside your other element with this:

WebElement input = driver.findElement( By.xpath( selector + "//input" ) );

Advantage: You have to search only once on the actual SUT, so it could give you a bonus in performance.

Disadvantage: Ugly... if you want to search for the parent element with css selectory and use xpath for it's childs, you have to check for types before you concatenate... In this case, Slanec's solution (using findElement on a WebElement) is much better.

Floozy answered 16/7, 2013 at 13:42 Comment(0)

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