CSS Locator / CSS Selector Tutorial

CSS locating strategy is the fastest way to identify an element compared to any other locating strategy currently available. Many of the automation frameworks now uses CSS as a locating strategy for locating elements. In this blog I will explain about how to identify an element using CSS locators.

1. Locate an element using id.

<input id="textid" value="textid" type="text"/>    
<button id="buttonid">Button wiht id</button>

Consider the above html code of a text box and a button, you can locate the above elements in html using there "id" attribute value.
In CSS  an element with id is identified by appending "#" to the start of its id attribute value. For ex the above text element can be located as "#textid". Similarly the button element can be identified as "#buttonid"


2. Locate an element using class attribute.

<input class="textusingcls" value="Text with single class" type="text"/>    
<button class="btnusingcls">Button with single Class</button>

Consider the above html code of a text box and a button, you can locate the above elements in html using there "class" attribute value.
In CSS  an element with class is identified by appending "." to the start of its class attribute value. For ex the above text element can be located as ".textusingcls". Similarly the button element can be identified as ".btnusingcls"

Locating an element having more than one class, for ex. consider the following html code.

<input class="textcls1 textcls2" value="Text with multiple class" type="text"/>    
<button class="buttoncls1 buttoncls2">Button with multiple Class</button>

The above element can be identified by replacing the spaces between the class values with "." . The above elements can be located as ".textcls1.textcls2" and ".buttoncls1.buttoncls2" respectively.

3. Locate an element using html tag.

<input id="textid" value="textid" type="text"/>    
<button id="buttonid">Button wiht id</button>

Consider the above html code of a text box and a button. To locate the above elements using there html tags in css, you just have to use the tag name. For ex. The above two elements can be located as "input" and "button" respectively.

4. Locate an element using html tag, class, id all together.

<input id="textidcls" class="textidcls" value="Text with id and class" type="text"/>    
<button id="buttonidcls" class="buttonidcls">Button with id and Class</button>

Consider the above html code of a text box and a button. You can locate the above element using a combination of html tag, id and class all together. To do that just append all the three independent locator together. For the above element the unique locators will be "input#textidcls.textidcls" and "button#buttonidcls.buttonidcls" respectively.

5. Locate element based on Parent element:

<input class="textcls" value="Text" type="text"/>  
<button class="buttoncls">Button</button>
<div id="parent">
    <div id="project-label">4. Locate Child element:</div>
    <input class="textcls" value="Text" type="text"/>    
    <button class="buttoncls">Button</button>
    <div>
        <input class="textcls" value="Text" type="text"/>    
        <button class="buttoncls">Button</button>
    </div>
</div>

Consider the above html code, if you try to find the text element using css locator ".textcls" you will get 3 elements in return. In case you need to find the text box under the div element with id "parent" you can locate it using the locator "#parent .textcls", but this also gives you 2 text box elements that are under the element with id "parent".
To find the direct child element of the "#parent" element you can use the ">" sign of css locator. So if you use the locator "#parent > .textcls" it will give you the direct child of "parent" element.
In css if you use space between the parent and child element, it will return all the child elements under the said parent irrespective of the hierarchy.

6. Identify an element using attribute value:

<input test="excttxt" value="Text for exact attr. value" type="text"/> </br>
<input test="strttxt1234" value="Text for starts with option" type="text"/> </br>
<input test="1234endtxt" value="Text for ends with option" type="text"/> </br>
<input test="12cntntxt34" value="Text for contains option" type="text"/> </br>

Consider the above html code, there are 4 text boxes each having a different value for attribute "test".Each element can be uniquely identified by using the following strategies:

• By exact attribute value: 'input[test="excttxt"] '
• By using starts with: 'input[test^="strttxt"]'
• By using ends with: 'input[test$="endtxt"]'
• By using contains: 'input[test*="cntntxt"]'

I had created a dummy html page which can be download from the following link: CSS-Locator-demo
To use the demo for identifying a locator:
1. Unzip the downloaded zip and open the page "css_locator.html" in chrome or firefox.
2. Now go to console in the browser. For Chrome: Right Click -> Inspect Element -> Console. For Firefox: Right Click ->Inspect with Firebug -> Console.
3. Use the jquery way of identifying element in the cosole. To do that type $('<Ur CSS locator>') under console and press enter.
Jquery will find the matching element for the said css locator and display it on the console as a link. If you hover on the said link it will highlight the said element.

More info on CSS selector at W3C link

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Android automation tools/frameworks

As we all know the market of android based devices is increasing day by day. Due to this lot of companies are developing android based applications. These applications can be categorized as following:

• Native apps - Apps that are developed using native android classes and runs on the device android OS.
• Webapps - These apps are actually web-applications  that are customized to work with Android based mobile devices.
• Hybrid apps - These apps are the mix of Native and Web based development. Such kinds of apps have some Native coding to interact with device hardware resources like camera,recorder, speaker etc. along with some web based components to directly serve the pages from a web-application itself.

With such a variety of apps in the market the QA will have a difficult task in hand, that is to automate such applications. There are a lot of tools and frameworks available in the market that can help you with automating the android apps. In this blog I will list a few of them and basic info about it. Following are some of the opensource apps available in the market:

• Robotium - Android automation framework built over Android instrumentation testing provided by the Android itself. This is currently one of the major frameworks available that can be used a base for your android app automation. More info at: http://code.google.com/p/robotium/
• NativeDriver - Extension of Selenium webdriver for Native android automation.This currently discontinued and no further support or development is being done on it. More info at: http://code.google.com/p/nativedriver/
• Bot-bot - An Opensource android automation project built over Robotium and NativeDriver frameworks. Comes with recording features to record user actions and export them as test case. It currently supports recording user actions of native application elements and new work is going on to support recording on Web-based/Hybrid apps. More info at: http://imaginea.github.com/bot-bot/
• MonkeyTalk -  Monkey talk is based on Android instrumentation testing provided by android. It have recorder which can be used as a eclipse plugin. The tool seems to be unstable and there is not much changes/ bug fixes that is seen.
• Calabash - Calabash is another android/ios automation tool available in the market which uses cucumber as its base. More info is available at: https://github.com/calabash/calabash-android

Will keep on updating the list whenever I find something new.

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Generate TestNG-xslt report using Maven

Earlier I had covered in my blog on how to generate a TestNG-xslt report for your TestNG test-case execution using Ant. Following is the link to it:
http://blog.varunin.com/2010/05/generating-selenium-reports-using.html

As many of the recent projects are now using maven as their build tool ,test-cases are also required to integrate itself to the existing build. In this blog I will mention about how to generate a TestNG-xslt report for your TestNG test-case execution using Maven.
Following is the "pom.xml" file for executing TestNG test-cases and to generate a "TestNG-xslt" report for the same:

Run the following command in terminal/command prompt to run your test cases and generate the TestNG-xslt report. The report will be generated under folder named "testng-xslt-report" inside the "target" folder under your build directory.

mvn clean test site org.reportyng:reporty-ng:1.2:reportyng

Note: In case the "test" task of mvn fails the report task of xslt will not be executed. You can apply any of the strategies mentioned in the following url to achieve the same as part of a single execution:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4174696/making-maven-run-all-tests-even-when-some-fail

Else 2 different commands have be run for test execution and report generation separately.

To know more about the TestNG-xslt configuration parameters please refer to my earlier blog post:
http://blog.varunin.com/2010/05/generating-selenium-reports-using.html

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Native android application automation using bot-bot

Its been long time that I had written a blog here. I was busy with writing an android automation tool for native android application testing, named as "bot-bot". Please take a look at it and let us know your comments. This is work-in-progress and there are lot-of features that still have to implement.

Following are some of the links giving information on bot-bot:
Webpage:
http://imaginea.github.com/bot-bot/

Github page:
https://github.com/Imaginea/bot-bot

Most of the things are covered in the webpage or in Github.
In case of issues you can contact me or send a mail.

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