Some (More) Simple Selenium Helper Methods

Are there parts of Selenium automation that scare you?  No? Well there are parts that scare me, and one of them is Advanced User Actions.  It’s very powerful and useful, but I never feel comfortable implementing User Actions without lots of Googling first to make sure I’m doing it right.

So I cheat, and look it up once and then put that dreadful code into a helper method so I never (?) have to look it up again!  If I later find a better way to do it, I can just update the helper method itself, and then all that newfound brilliance will trickle down to the test cases that use that method. I call it (drum roll please) moveToElementAndClickCss():

public void moveToElementAndClickCss(String cssString) {
	new WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.cssSelector(cssString)));
	new WebDriverWait(driver, 20).until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.cssSelector(cssString)));
	Actions builder = new Actions(driver);
	Action moveAndClick = builder.moveToElement(driver.findElement(By.cssSelector(cssString)))
	.click()
	.build();
	moveAndClick.perform();	
}

   

We pass a css element path as the argument and let the method code take care of moving to that element and clicking it.

I of course have another one called moveToElementAndClickXpath(), which you should be able to infer from the css version.  These methods are very simple, but again help to speed up test case design and make the resulting tests more maintainable and easier to read.