Question

I am writing some Selenium tests and I need to be able to find an ancestor of a WebElement that I have already found.

This is what I’m trying but is returning no results

// checkbox is also a WebElement
WebElement container = checkbox.findElement(By.xpath(
    "current()/ancestor-or-self::div[contains(@class, 'x-grid-view')]") );

The image below shows the div that I have selected highlighted in dark blue and the one I want to find with an arrow pointing at it.

UPDATE
Tried prestomanifesto’s suggestion and got the following error

[cucumber]       org.openqa.selenium.InvalidSelectorException: The given selector ./ancestor::div[contains(@class, 'x-grid-view']) is either invalid or does not result in a WebElement. The following error occurred:
[cucumber]       [InvalidSelectorError] Unable to locate an element with the xpath expression ./ancestor::div[contains(@class, 'x-grid-view']) because of the following error:
[cucumber]       [Exception... "The expression is not a legal expression."  code: "51" nsresult: "0x805b0033 (NS_ERROR_DOM_INVALID_EXPRESSION_ERR)"  location: "file:///C:/Users/JUAN~1.MEN/AppData/Local/Temp/anonymous849245187842385828webdriver-profile/extensions/fxdriv

Update 2
Really weird, even by ID is not working

[cucumber]       org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException: Unable to locate element:{"method":"xpath","selector":"./ancestor::div[@id='gridview-1252']"}

Update 3

The following XPATH works, but is brittle

../../../../../../../*

 

Answer 1

This should select the element you want

./ancestor::div[contains(concat(' ', @class, ' '), ' x-grid-view ')][1]

In plain English: Of all the ancestor div elements that have ' x-grid-view ' in their class, select the first (closest) one.

Notes:

• I concat spaces as a defensive measure to prevent partial matches.
• current() is an XSLT function, not an XPath one. It has no meaning outside of XSLT. The current node is expressed as . in XPath.