Using Selenium 2's IWebDriver to interact with elements on the page
I'm using Selenium's IWebDriver to write Unit Tests in C#.
Such is an example:
IWebDriver defaultDriver = new InternetExplorerDriver();
var ddl = driver.FindElements(By.TagName("select"));
The last line retrieves the select HTML element wrapped in a IWebElement.
I need a way to simulate selection to a specific option in that select list but I can't figure out how to do it.
Upon some research, I found examples where people are using the ISelenium DefaultSelenium class to accomplish the following, but I am not making use of this class because I'm doing everything with IWebDriver and INavigation (from defaultDriver.Navigate()).
I also noticed that ISelenium DefaultSelenium contains a ton of other methods that aren't available in the concrete implementations of IWebDriver.
So is there any way I can use IWebDriver and INavigation in conjunction with ISelenium DefaultSelenium ?
Answer
As ZloiAdun mentions, there is a lovely new Select class in the OpenQA.Selenium.Support.UI namespace. That's one of the best ways to access a selection element and it's options because it's api is so easy. Let's say you've got a web page that looks something like this
<!DOCTYPE html>
<head>
<title>Disposable Page</title>
</head>
<body >
<select id="select">
<option value="volvo">Volvo</option>
<option value="saab">Saab</option>
<option value="mercedes">Mercedes</option>
<option value="audi">Audi</option>
</select>
</body>
</html>
You're code to access the select would look like this. Note how I create the Select object by passing a normal IWebElement to it's constructor. You have plenty of methods on the Select object. Take a look at the source for more information, until it gets properly documented.
using OpenQA.Selenium.Support.UI;
using OpenQA.Selenium;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using OpenQA.Selenium.IE;
namespace Selenium2
{
class SelectExample
{
public static void Main(string[] args)
{
IWebDriver driver = new InternetExplorerDriver();
driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("www.example.com");
//note how here's i'm passing in a normal IWebElement to the Select
// constructor
Select select = new Select(driver.FindElement(By.Id("select")));
IList<IWebElement> options = select.GetOptions();
foreach (IWebElement option in options)
{
System.Console.WriteLine(option.Text);
}
select.SelectByValue("audi");
//This is only here so you have time to read the output and
System.Console.ReadLine();
driver.Quit();
}
}
}
A couple things to note about the Support class however. Even if you downloaded the latest beta, the support DLL won't be there. The Support package has a relatively long history in the Java libraries (that's where PageObject lives) but it's still pretty fresh in the .Net driver. Fortunately, it's really easy to build from source. I pulled from SVN then referenced the WebDriver.Common.dll from the beta download and built in C# Express 2008. This class hasn't been as well tested as some of the other classes, but my example worked in Internet Explorer and Firefox.
There's a few other things that I should point out based on your code above. Firstly the line you were using to find the select element
driver.FindElements(By.TagName("select"));
is going to find all select elements. you should probably use driver.FindElement, without the 's'.
Also, very rarely would you use INavigation directly. You'll do most of your navigation like driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://example.com");
Lastly, DefaultSelenium is the way to access the older Selenium 1.x apis. Selenium 2 is a pretty significant departure from Selenium 1, so unless you're trying to migrate old tests to the new Selenium 2 api (often referred to as the WebDriver api) you won't use DefaultSelenium.