Selenium By Class

Introduction to By Class

The By class in Selenium is used to locate elements on a web page. It provides various methods for locating elements, such as by ID, name, class name, tag name, link text, partial link text, CSS selector, and XPath. In previous tutorial, we saw that By class object is passed as an argument to the findElement/findElements method of the WebDriver interface to locate or reach to elements on a web page.

By class usage syntax

The By class is passed as an argument to the findElement/findElements method of the WebDriver interface to locate elements on a web page. The syntax for using the By class to locate elements on a web page is as follows:

• With findElement method:

  driver.findElement(By.id("elementId"));

• With findElements method:

  driver.findElements(By.className("className"));

By Methods Details

We will see the details of each By class method:

1. By.id(String id): This method locates HTML elements by the value of their "id" attribute.

   HTML Element

   If we have any html element with element id like below:

   <input id="elementId" type="text" />

   Selenium Code

   then we can locate this element using below code:

   driver.findElement(By.id("elementId"));

2. By.name(String name): This method locates HTML elements by the value of their "name" attribute.

   HTML Element

   If we have any html element with element name like below:

   <input name="elementName" type="text" />

   Selenium Code

   then we can locate this element using below code:

   driver.findElement(By.name("elementName"));

3. By.className(String className): This method locates HTML elements by the value of their "class" attribute.

   HTML Element

   If we have any html element with element class like below:

   <input class="className" type="text" />

   Selenium Code

   then we can locate this element using below code:

   driver.findElement(By.className("className"));

4. By.tagName(String tagName): This method locates HTML elements by their tag name.

   HTML Element

   If we have any html element with element tag name like below:

   <input type="text" />

   Selenium Code

   then we can locate this element using below code:

   driver.findElement(By.tagName("tagName"));

5. By.linkText(String linkText): This method locates HTML anchor elements by the exact text they display.

   HTML Element

   If we have any html element with element link text like below:

   <a href="https://nicetesters.com">NiceTesters</a>

   Selenium Code

   then we can locate this element using below code:

   driver.findElement(By.linkText("NiceTesters"));

6. By.partialLinkText(String partialLinkText): This method locates HTML anchor elements by a partial match of the text they display.

   HTML Element

   If we have any html element with element partial link text like below:

   <a href="https://nicetesters.com">NiceTesters</a>

   Selenium Code

   then we can locate this element using below code:

   driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Nice"));

7. By.cssSelector(String selector): This method locates HTML elements by a CSS selector.

   HTML Element

   If we have any html element with element css selector like below:

   <input type="text" class="className" />

   Selenium Code

   then we can locate this element using below code:

   driver.findElement(By.cssSelector(".className"));

   In this we are using dot(.) before the class name to locate the element based on class name.
8. By.xpath(String xpath): This method locates HTML elements by an XPath expression.

   HTML Element

   If we have any html element with element xpath like below:

   <input type="text" />

   Selenium Code

   then we can locate this element using below code:

   driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input"));

   In this we are using double forward slash(//) before the tag name to locate the element based on tag name. This is the relative xpath expression.

By Class code Example

We will see a simple example of using the By class to locate elements on a web page.

HTML Code

Suppose we have the following HTML code:

<button id="elementId">Click Me</button>

Selenium Code

We can locate the above element using the By.id method as follows:

WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
driver.get("https://www.example.com");
WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.id("elementId"));
element.click();