Locate your locators - Python bindings changes upcoming
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In real estate, the mantra for finding a new house or office space is “location, location, location!”. It could be said that when working with Selenium, a critical aspect of writing tests is “locators, locators, locators!”. Having a robust locator strategy - in your app under test and in your test framework - is highly important for effective testing.
If you are a Pythonista like myself and using Selenium for your test automation, then there are some important changes coming to how locators are defined and used.
Sometime after Selenium 4.2, the Python Selenium bindings will remove locator-specific methods for finding elements. This means that the methods
driver.find_element_by_id("some_id")
driver.find_element_by_name("some_name")
driver.find_element_by_tag_name("some_tag")
driver.find_element_by_css_selector("some_selector")
driver.find_element_by_class_name("some_class")
driver.find_element_by_link_text("some_text")
driver.find_element_by_partial_link_text("some_other_text")
driver.find_element_by_xpath("some_xpath")
will be removed. All of these methods are in fact special cases of
driver.find_element(By_object, "some_locator")
so this approach is now preferred (required, even) with the Python bindings.
Note that it’s good practice to use the By object which has specific values for using particular locator strategies. For example, this line
driver.find_element_by_id("submit_button").click()
driver.find_element_by_css_selectors('.myelement child').text
becomes
driver.find_element(By.ID, "submit_button").click()
driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, '.myelement child').text
If you’re really desperate however you can use strings instead of the By object:
driver.find_element('id', "submit_button").click()
driver.find_element('css selector', '.myelement child').text
If you have any plans to upgrade your Selenium client for your Python tests to recent versions of Selenium 4, definitely keep these changes in mind. It’s a good time to update your locator strategy and structure.
(This article was originally posted here. Thanks to the Selenium core contributors for adding this here!)
