Question

I am testing a website that has an “account” page that displays a table of available subscription levels, where the column headings are the different kinds of accounts, and the rows list all features, and which are available at what level. E.g.:

          fanboy       poweruser     neophyte     freeloader
Widgets   1,000        500           250          100
Doodads     750        350           100          100
Thingies    500        250           100           50
          [UPGRADE]    [UPGRADE]     [UPGRADE]    Your Plan  

This is all done as nested div elements with unique classnames, so finding specific cells by their corresponding classnames is a snap. E.g.:

var yourPlan = driver.FindElement(By.ClassName("your_plan"));  

I can also find specific cells by their XPath, if I already know it. E.g.:

var yourPlan = driver.FindElement(By.XPath(".//div[@class='your_plan']"));  

But there are times when I need to discover the xpath of the cell I've come to by way of classname, and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do this in Webdriver (C#). Has anyone done this before?

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EDIT: Apologies to all, for not being clearer about this: I'm not having any trouble finding an element by classname or other attribute (or even xpath, when I know it already). But what I need, is a way for webdriver to report the full xpath of what it found to me, once it's found said element via a means other than xpath.

Hope that helps.

Any help appreciated.
Thanks
Greg

Answer 1

There’s not really any way for Selenium to give you this information. While there are some tools that will generate the XPath for a given element (the Firebug and XPather plug-ins for Firefox come to mind), this is not a feature that Selenium provides. I wish I had a better answer for you, but the answer is no, Selenium won’t provide you with the XPath to an element that you’ve found via some other means.