Actions should accept CSS selectors as element names

[pgergo]

Currently SeleniumElementSelector transforms element names from actions, and only outputs Xpath strings matching id and name attributes, but Selenium also accepts other types of selectors, such as "css=div.mydiv". It would be very nice to let actions use these selectors, because it also allows more complex expressions. An arbitrary element type can be used for this, say "css". For this only two steps are necessary, defining an additional staticmethod for SeleniumElementSelector, and extending the list of supported elements in the language files with the new type. This can be performed with a bit of metaprogramming magic from hooks, but implementing it in the codebase is a much cleaner solution. Please, consider it.

[heynemann]

Do you think you can provide a patch for this?

It would help a lot to understand better the issue and the solution you
propose.

Thanks,
Bernardo Heynemann

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 1:28 PM, pgergo <
reply@reply.github.com

wrote:

Currently SeleniumElementSelector transforms element names from actions,
and only outputs Xpath strings matching id and name attributes, but
Selenium also accepts other types of selectors, such as "css=div.mydiv". It
would be very nice to let actions use these selectors, because it also
allows more complex expressions. An arbitrary element type can be used for
this, say "css". For this only two steps are necessary, defining an
additional staticmethod for SeleniumElementSelector, and extending the list
of supported elements in the language files with the new type. This can be
performed with a bit of metaprogramming magic from hooks, but implementing
it in the codebase is a much cleaner solution. Please, consider it.

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#73

[pgergo]

On Wed, 14 Dec 2011 07:32:20 -0800
Bernardo Heynemann reply@reply.github.com wrote:

Do you think you can provide a patch for this?

It would help a lot to understand better the issue and the solution you
propose.

Just a few minutes ago we came up with an alternative solution. My original proposal was less generic, because that would require a new special element type, which would make many of the prewritten actions unusable. But this way is also fine for us:

--- selenium_element_selector.py.orig 2011-12-13 18:57:51.000000000 +0100
+++ selenium_element_selector.py 2011-12-14 17:06:58.134074138 +0100
@@ -19,6 +19,8 @@
class SeleniumElementSelector(object):
@staticmethod
def element(element_type, element_name):

•    if element_name.startswith("css="):
  

•        return element_name
   if element_type == "element":
       return SeleniumElementSelector.generic(element_name)
   method = getattr(SeleniumElementSelector, element_type, SeleniumElementSelector.generic)
  

Of course this solution requires some discipline from the test writer, since it is possible to reference any DOM element this way, even if the action requires a specific type. But rewriting the user supplied CSS selector seems to be an overkill for this purpose.

Best regards

Gergely Peli