First project in selenium with Java

Introduction#

This is an introduction to Selenium, using Java. While we don’t expect you to know anything regarding Selenium, you have to have prior Java knowledge to follow this course.

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Setting up IntelliJ Idea for Selenium

Prerequisites:

Java is installed
Selenium is extracted in a folder (Contains 2 files, and 1 folder)

Follow these steps to set up IntelliJ Idea for Selenium.

Click On “New Project”.
Choose Java < “Hello World” Application
Type the name of the Project, and create it.

Your Screen should look something like this

Now, go to

File < Project Structure < Modules < Dependencies

There, click on the green plus(+) icon, and choose Library. Then navigate to the extracted Selenium folder, and add ”selenium-java 2.4.0.jar”. After adding this, click on the green plus(+) icon again, and now choose “Directory”. This time, locate the libs folder of Selenium, and click on ok, while selecting it.

At the end, your Project Structure should look like this

Now, click on OK, and you’re all set.

Setting up ChromeDriver

Prerequisites : ChromeDriver is downloaded

Copy the following code into your class.

public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "path of the exe file\\chromedriver.exe");
}

If you’re using linux, give the path to the ChromeDriver Binary.

Opening up a Website using Selenium

We use the get method to go to a website. For Example, this would open google

public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
    System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "path of the exe file\\chromedriver.exe");
    WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
    driver.get("https:www.google.com");
    Thread.sleep(3000); //wait for 3 seconds
    driver.quit();      //close Chrome
}

driver.quit() closes the Browser. To create a delay, we use Thread.sleep(3000).

Getting Elements in Selenium

Every Html-Element in Selenium is called a WebElement. For example, a p tag would be a WebElement, an a tag would be a WebElement, etc. Consider the following html Structure:

<a id="link1" href="https://www.google.com">google</a>
<p class="p1">
This is a paragraph
</p>

Now, if we wanted to get the a tag, we could do

WebElement link = driver.findElement(By.id("link1"));

Now, we can click on this, by

link.click();

Lets take another example. If we wanted the text of the p tag, ie, ”This is a paragraph”, we can do

WebElement p = driver.findElement(By.className("p1"));
System.out.println(p.getText());

We can also get Elements by tags, like

WebElement tag = driver.findElement(By.tagName("a"));

Working Example in Selenium

Now that we know the basics of Selenium, we can make our own project. For this example, we’ll be making a program, which finds the Newest questions on stack-overflow.

We start easy, lets open stack-overflow.

public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
    System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "path of the exe file\\chromedriver.exe");
    WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
    driver.get("https:stackoverflow.com");
    Thread.sleep(3000);
    driver.quit();
}

Now, if you look at the source of the page, you find that all questions, are a tags, with an className of question-hyperlink. However, since there are multiple questions, we use a List of WebElement, instead of WebElement. Thus, we can do

public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
    System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "path to chromedriver\\chromedriver.exe");
    WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
    driver.get("https:stackoverflow.com");
    List<WebElement> list = driver.findElements(By.className("question-hyperlink"));
}

Now, we need to get the href attribute of the a tag, which has the link of the question. To do this, we can use getAttribute("href") on the each WebElement, like

public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
    System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "path to chromedriver\\chromedriver.exe");
    WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
    driver.get("https:stackoverflow.com");
    List<WebElement> list = driver.findElements(By.className("question-hyperlink"));
    System.out.println(list.size());
    list.forEach(e->System.out.println(e.getAttribute("href")));
    driver.quit();
}

This prints out the links of the top-questions on Stack-overflow.

Getting Attributes of WebElements in Selenium

To get the attribute of a WebElement, we use getAttribute on that WebElement. For example, consider the following html tag

<a id="click" href="https://www.google.com">

We can find the Element’s href attribute by

WebElement e = driver.findElement(By.id("click"));
System.out.println(e.getAttribute("href")); //prints https://www.google.com