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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T10:44:50+00:00

Looking at Knockout examples, there is no real need for adding IDs to HTML

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Looking at Knockout examples, there is no real need for adding IDs to HTML elements. Creating a large form without the IDs seems to make it easy to maintain.

Though, this creates a problem with Selenium HQ. There is no way to uniquely identify elements on the form.

What are the choices? Is there another method for Selenium to select elements created by Knockout?
or will I have to assign IDs to elements?

I have reviewed other knockout and selenium questions. All of them had IDs defined for the HTML elements, when they started.

Thanks
Abhi

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Short answer: Add ID’s to your HTML elements.

    Although you do not need these attributes in order for your website to function, you will make the life of your testers so much easier.

    I’ve encountered the exact same problem in a project where a large ASP.NET MVC 4 application was created, that uses Knockout.js and Selenium extensively. For form elements, I relied on ASP.NET MVC utility methods to generate the output HTML in combination with data-bind expressions. ASP.NET MVC automatically generates unique NAME and ID attributes based on the backing model.

    However, in all other cases where I had to render tables, display forms or dialogs, I ended up adding ID attributes to these HTML elements. If you think about it, this is a logical consequence of your requirements. Knockout is awesome because you longer need ID’s and NAME’s to wire your layout (HTML) and behavior (JS) together. However, other frameworks, such as Selenium, require these ID’s to be present.

    Yes, you could work your way around it with complicated and bloated XPATH expressions. But this will dramatically decrease the maintainability of your tests. In my experience, adding ID’s to hundreds of HTML elements took less than a day and increased productivity of our testers by a manifold.

    Remember, it may be nice to develop functional websites with as little HTML as possible. But if this makes your website untestable, you will lose more than you gain. Testability is non-functional requirement, but this does not mean it is not important!

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