By Locator Mistakes

Please see below a few locators used to find web elements:

By loginLabel = By.xpath("//*[@id=\"loginlabel\"]");

By logoutLinkBy = By.xpath("//*[@id=\"login_drop_panel\"]/div/ul/li[3]/a");

By cardBy = By.xpath("//*[@id=\"root\"]/form/div/span[2]/div[2]/span/input");

How many issues can you find?

---

Let’s take the locators one by one.

By loginLabel = By.xpath("//*[@id=\"loginlabel\"]");

• Since this is a locator and not a label, By should be added to the variable name.

• the element has an id attribute with a static and unique value so By.id should be used instead of By.xpath

The correct code should be

By loginLabelBy = By.id("loginlabel");

---

By logoutLinkBy = By.xpath("//*[@id=\"login_drop_panel\"]/div/ul/li[3]/a");

• The double quotes inside of the xpath expression need to be prefixed by \ which makes the expression hard to read; double quotes should be changed to single quotes

• * should be replaced with the element tag which is always present and not changing

The correct code should be

By logoutLinkBy = By.xpath("//button[@id='login_drop_panel']/div/ul/li[3]/a");

---

By cardBy = By.xpath("//*[@id=\"root\"]/form/div/span[2]/div[2]/span/input");

• the only thing to do here is to talk to the development team about improving the html code; anything else is a bad idea

---

Thanks for reading.