Type of attributes to find Element

Below are the list of attribute that can use to find out WebElements.

Find Element By ID- 

This will locates elements by the value of their id attribute. The link in the above example has an id that we can use:

<a id="change-password" class="btn" href="#">Forgotten Password</a>

Then, the link can be located using:

driver.findElement(By.id("change-password"));

If ID is available, then it should be used as the first preferred choice.

Find Element By Name 

you have input fields which could be like:

<input class="form-control" name="email" type="text" placeholder="Email"/>

We can then locate the email field by the input name attribute

driver.findElement(By.name("email"));

Find Element By Class Name

This locates elements by the value of the class attribute.

<a id="change-password" class="btn" href="#">Forgotten Password</a>

Then, the link can be located using:

driver.findElement(By.className("btn"));

Find Element By XPath

XPath locators are mostly used. It requires knowledge in XPath query language.
Let’s look at an example usage of an XPath for this HTML:

<a id="change-password" href="#">Change Password</a>

We can then locate the email field by the input name attribute

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//a[@id='change-password']"));

Find Element By CSS Selector

Locates elements via the driver’s underlying W3 CSS Selector engine. CSS selector locator is powerful as it can be used to locate any element on a page.

<a id="change-password" class="btn" href="./some-link">Forgotten Password</a>

We can then locate the email field by the input name attribute

driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("#change-password"));

Here, # represents id of the element. And the . notation represents the class attribute of an element.

driver.findElement(By.cssSelector(".btn"));

Find Element By Link Text

This method locates elements by the exact text it displays. This method is normally the preferred locator for links on a page.
For example, suppose we have this link on a page:

<a href="#" id="change-password" class="btn" >Forgotten Password</a>

Then, the link can be located using:

driver.findElement(By.linkText("Forgotten Password"));

Find Element By Partial Link Text

When we are not sure of the exact wording of the link text but want to find a link or links that contains a given text, we can use

driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Forgotten "));

OR

driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Password"));

Find Element By Tag Name

This locator finds elements by their HTML tag name.

<h1>Welcome to SDET World!</h1>

We can then locate the email field by the input name attribute


driver.findElement(By.tagName("h1"));