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Selenium Locators – Installing and using XPath Helper Add-on

Selenium Locators – Installing and using XPath Helper Add-on

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As explained in one of the previous posts, Firebug and Firepath add-ons for locating and validating the UI elements on the page got deprecated and discontinued and we have to use alternative add-ons in place of Firebug and Firepath.

Though ChroPath is the best alternative of Firebug & Firepath in locating the UI elements and validating the XPath Expressions & CSS Selectors, we can also use XPath Helper in Chrome browser to auto-generate the Absolute XPath Expressions and for validating the XPath Expressions.

Note: XPath Helper add-on is only available in the Chrome browser and can only be used for auto-generating Absolute XPath Expressions and validating the XPath Expressions.

And for auto-generating Relative XPath Expressions, we have to use a different add-on known as Relative XPath Helper (Will be explained in the next article)

In this article, I am going to practically demonstrate auto-generating Absolute XPath Expressions and validating XPath Expressions using the XPath Helper add-on.

Let’s get started.

Selenium Locators – Installing and using XPath Helper Add-on

Follow the below steps for auto-generating the Absolute XPath Expressions and validating XPath Expressions using XPath Helper Add-on in Chrome browser:

1) Open Chrome browser, google search for ‘XPath Helper’ and click on the below link from the search results:

XPath Helper - Search

2) Click on the ‘Add to Chrome’ button from the Chrome Web Store page of ‘XPath Helper’ as shown below:

XPath Helper - Add to Chrome

3) Click on ‘Add Extension’ button on the displayed dialog as shown below:

XPath Helper - Add Extension

 

4) Observe that the XPath Helper Add-on got added to the Chrome Browser as shown below:

XPath Helper - Added

5) Open any application say  http://omayo.blogspot.com/ in the Chrome Browser as shown below:

XPath Helper - Open App

6) Click on the ‘XPath Helper’ icon on the chrome browser and observe that ‘Query & Result’ sections of the XPath Helper will be displayed as shown below:

XPath Helper - Qurey Result

7) While the above Query and Results sections are displayed, Click & Hold the Shift Key and hover the mouse on the required UI element to be located. Observe that the Absolute XPath Expression of the mouse hovered UI element will be auto-generated and displayed in the ‘Query’ section as shown below:

XPath Helper - Generated

8) We can copy the auto-generated Absolute XPath Expressions and later use it for locating the required UI elements as shown below:

XPath Helper - Copy

9) Apart from auto-generating the Absolute XPath Expressions, we can also use ‘XPath Helper’ add-on to validate the existing XPath Expressions.

Let’s validate the XPath Expression say //input[@name=’q’] 

Enter the above XPath Expression into the Query section and press ‘Enter’ key on your keyboard and observe that the ‘Search’ text box field got located as shown below:

XPath Helper - highlighted

Here concludes this article.

In the next article, I will explain a different alternative for Firebug and Firepath.

Next Steps:

  • > To learn more about Selenium, continue to the next post (Click on Next Post link below)
  • > Check complete Selenium Tutorial Contents here (Click here)

Please leave your questions/comments/feedback below.

Happy Learning ?

About Me > Arun Motoori

On a mission to contribute to the Software Testing Community in all possible ways.

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