Question

I have this xpath: //*[@id="someId::button"]

Pressing it shows a dropdown list of values.

Now, I know all the elements in the list have an id like this :

//*[@id="someId--popup::popupItemINDEX"]

, where INDEX is a number from 1 to whatever the number of options are.

I also know the value which I must click.

One question would be: since I will always know the id of the button which generates the dropdown, can I get all the elements in the dropdown with a reusable method? (I need to interact with more than one dropdown)

The way I thought about it is:
get the root of the initial ID, as in:

//*[@id="someId 

then add the rest : --popup::popupItem. I also need to add the index and I thought I could use a try block (in order to get though the exceptions when I give a bigger than expected index) like this:

 for(int index=1;index<someBiggerThanExpectedNumber;index++){
     try{
         WebElement aux= driver.findElement(By.xpath(builtString+index+"\"]"));
         if(aux.getText().equals(myDesiredValue))
             aux.click();
     }catch(Exception e){}
 }

Note that I am using the webdriver api and java.

I would like to know if this would work and if there is an easier way of doing this, given the initial information I have.

EDIT: The way I suggested works, but for an easier solution, the accepted answer should be seen

Answer 1

As a rule of thumb, try to select more elements by one query, if possible. Searching for many elements one-by-one will get seriously slow.

If I understand your needs well, a good way to do this would be using

driver.findElement(By.id("someId::button")).click();
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[contains(@id, 'someId--popup::popupItem') " +
    "and text()='" + myDesiredValue + "']"))
    .click();

For more information about XPath, see the spec. It’s surprisingly a very good read if you can skip the crap!

That finds and clicks an element with text equal to you desired value which contains “someId–popup::popupItem” in its ID.

List<WebElement> list = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//*[contains(@id, 'someId--popup::popupItem')]"));

That finds all just all elements that contain “someId–popup::popupItem” in their ID. You can then traverse the list and look for your desired element.

Did you know you can call findElement() on a WebElement to search just it’s children?
– driver.findElement(By.id("someId")).findElements(By.className("clickable"))

Without a peek on the underlying HTML, I guess I can’t offer the best approach, but I have some in my head.