Advanced Test Automation – Generate your own css locators using nokogiri

Some of the pages that I test have hundreds of check boxes. I needed a way to generate the locators to use in selenium and create classes to use those locators.
This is an example of a class that contains selenium css locators for navigation links

class Navigation
  def initialize * browser
    @location =  "css=a:contains(\"Location\")"
    @amenities =  "css=a:contains(\"Amenities\")"
    @photos =  "css=a:contains(\"Photos\")"
    @contact =  "css=a:contains(\"Contact\")"  
    @further_details =  "css=a:contains(\"Further Details\")"
  end
  attr_accessor :location, :amenities, :photos, :contact, :further_details
end

To use this class I would new it up and use standard selenium commands. This is how I would navigate to the amenities page

navigation = Navigation.new
browser.click amenities

The spec below demonstrates how to get data you need using nokogiri. I want to click an anmenity check box with the label beach whose input name is “amenity_1_1_6”. I could click this checkbox with this command browser.click “amenity_1_1_6”, but I want to have a way to store all of the amenities on the page with the variable named by their label.

require "spec"
require "nokogiri"
describe "Find elements to use as locators in a web test" do

  it "should find the value of name for the input element and the text in span" do
    sample_html = ''
    attribute_name=""
    attribute_value=""
    doc = Nokogiri::HTML(sample_html)
    doc.css("label").each do |check_box|
      attribute_name =  check_box.text
      attribute_value = check_box.children.css("input")[0]["name"]
      attribute_name = attribute_name.strip
      attribute_name = attribute_name.to_s.downcase

    end
    attribute_name.should=="beach"
    attribute_value.should=="amenity_1_1_6"
  end
end

To take this further I can print the contents of my class file to generate my locators from this spec.

puts "@#{attribute_name} = \"#{attribute_value}\""

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