XPath Overview

XPath

XPath gets quiet a bad press with regards to Selenium testing, and is sometimes the reason people ‘give up’ with their test automation. Basically, XPath is very powerful, it treats the web page as a structured document (which it is), and allows you to traverse the hierarchy of nodes (elements).

The two common misconceptions of XPath are: it’s slow, and it’s brittle. These are only true of complex XPaths that are heavily dependent of the structure of your web page. It’s true that in general XPath is slower than CSS locators, but you can just as easily write complex and brittle CSS locators.

XPath is one of the locator strategies often used when Selenium IDE is recording a test. The brittleness and speed issues can be mostly avoided by using simple and relative XPaths. This means finding an element near the one you want that you can locate quickly and easily (great if it has an id), and then describing how to get to your target element. As with CSS, some examples will help me to explain.

Examples:

<div id="register">

<label>Email:</label>

<input type="text"/>

<label>Full Name:</label>

<input type="text"/>

</div>

To locate the fullname textbox in the above HTML snippet you could use the following:

xpath=id(‘register’)/input[2]

This locates the second input element beneath the element with an id value of ‘register’

xpath=//label[text()=‘Full Name:’]/following-sibling::input

This first locates a label element with the text contents of ‘Full Name:’ and then moves onto the following input element

The more complex your XPath gets, the longer it could take for the browser to find your element, and the more dependent your locator is on the structure of the page. This means that minor changes to the HTML on the page that cause no functional changes could quite easily cause your tests to fail.