css selectors in place of xpath for selenium locators

yeah so in all these year, i have always resolved to using xpath whenever i am creating selenium scripts and i need to do stuff with element that have no id. well as you would probably know, xpath executes so slow on IE.

For intance i have a test suite that would run in 1hr 30mins on firefox/ safari but the same test suites would take over 4hrs to run to completion on IE.

So with the help of a colleagues, i have been using css selectors from last week and i can say this has drastically improved the speed of our test and you would notice too much difference between IE and FF/Safari anymore.

It takes some time to get used to but these are some link that might be useful to get start with ....

• A summary or cheat sheet could be found here
• Other links are: W3C CSS2 and W3C CSS3

Enjoy .....

Selenium Test execution speed on Safari vs Internet Explorer

I have been working on a selenium test suite that contains about 150 tests.

These test would normally take about 4hrs 30mins for it to execute to completion.

I tried to run same tests on Safari today, and it took exactly 1hr 9min. This is such a big difference 

and i think it is because of the extreme use of Xpath in the test suite. And as it is known thatXpath execute soooo slow in IE.

This is quite good as i have decided to run intraday tests in safari so as to get faster feedback, cos up until now i am unable to kick off these test because a test suite that takes 4hr 30min to executes would have taken almost half of my day and does little good.

I would be writing another post that talk about how to efficiently use Xpath in your tests whenever you need to ......

Any comments ............

Not able to accept meetings in Outlook

Need to say i got an error displaying on the invite: This meeting is not in the calendar, it may have been moved or deleted.

Discovered that when i click on the "Accept Button" for meetings which i have been invited, the Accept button doesn't do anything. The invite sent to me,looks like this :




Doing a bit of google got me this link, and it worked for me

Just incase the link goes down some day, here is what you need to do

1. Kill all services relating to Microsoft products (i.e. Word, Outlook, Messenger etc.)
2. Then from the Run line, enter "outlook.exe /cleanfreebusy".

Waiting for Elements in an IFrame on a WebPage to Load

Waiting for a page to load while writing selenium scripts is pretty straightforward using the
selenium.WaitForPageToLoad("timeout") timeout is time in millisecond.

Sometimes using this command doesn't work, especially when you the whole page is not loaded or reloaded but a popup is loaded in a div on the page. In situation like this i would used the
selenium.WaitForCondition("ScriptToReturnwhich ReturnTrue OrFalse", "timeout");
e.g. of scripts would be

selenium.WaitForCondition(selenium.browserbot.get CurrentWindow().document
.getElement ById('idOfElement ToBelocated')!=null", "60000");

This has always worked well for well until today, i had a special case where the element that i needed to wait for it to load was inside an IFrame, which is loaded within a parent page. Using the Wait for condition as above kept timing out as the Javascript could not access the IFrame.

what worked for me after several hours of trying is:

selenium.WaitForCondition("selenium.browserbot.getCurrent Window()
.frames['Name Of IFrame'].document.get Element ById
'idOfElement ToBelocated')!= null", "60000");

This brilliantly eliminated my nightmare .......

Comments are welcome

Need to get a value of an attribute using selenium

I was in this situation when i needed to get the value of an html attribute and i found the selenium.getattribute very handy .....

Okay the scenario was such that there was an element which is collapsible on the page and the only attibute for that element that indictated the status of the collapsible element was the 'Class'. when the element was collapsed, the value of the class attribute was 'asleep' and when the element was expanded, the value of the class atttribute was 'awake'.

The script used to determine the status of this element is

selenium.GetAttribute("elementLocator@nameofAttribute");

so if the id of my element is FundingClass and the attribute we are interested in is the 'Class'

The selenium code will be
selenium.GetAttribute("FundingClass@Class");

Hope this helps someone .....

Using selenium.GetEval(script)to execute Javascript

The task at hand was to navigate through the DOM of a particular webpage and check the
style.display attribute of an object or element if you prefer. There are two elements on this page that displayed either success or failure messages.(msgSuccess and msgFailed)
For perfomance reasons, if previously a successful message was displayed and subsequently the you get a failure message, what the developers of the page did was to amend the style.display attribute.

<span style="display: none;" id="msgSuccess" class="MyMsgSuccess">

The HTML code above implies the element 'msgSuccess' would not be displayed

<span style="" id="msgSuccess" class="MyMsgSuccess">

In the second case, the msg success would be displayed ....

The problem i encountered was, sometimes i would have

< span style="display: none;" id="msgSuccess" class="MyMsgSuccess" > Operation Successful </span >

If i do a selenium.GetText("msgSuccess"), i get the text returned even though the style.display is set to none. Hence the need for the Selenium.GetEval to check the value of the style.display attribute as that seem as a true test for the web page

I have done:

const string script = "document.getElementById(\"msgSuccess\").style.display";
string evalResult = selenium.GetEval(script);

The above script failed as selenium was executing the javascript in the selenium console and not on the Application under test (AUT)
and searching the internet got me doing:

const string script = "selenium.browserbot.getCurrentWindow().document.getElementById(\"msgSuccess\").style.display";
string evalResult = selenium.GetEval(script);

This way i got the javascript to be run on the Application under test ....

Internet Explorer doesnt handle xpath to locate images exceptionally well

So i have been doing a lot of selenium and the website i am trying to automate test for
doesnt have a lot of element with id, name, or any other HTML attributes that makes selenium testing a bit easier.

So i have been using of xpath, my intent was to click on an image and i have used the src attribute of the image element.

so my original command,

selenium.click ("xpath=//img[@src="location/of/image/on/disc"]");

This works excellently on firefox but on IE, i keep getting the error "Element not found!"

so after several tries, this definitely work on both IE and firefox ......

selenium.click ("xpath=//img[@contains(@href, "google.com")]");
The second parameter of the xpath "contains" a segment of the link that the image element points to.Note that the img element has a href and that is why i am able to use the "contains" method of the xpath to locate the img.