Robot Framework - Selenium2Library - Input text into field according to the text before it

Question

Due to every ID being randomly generated after each refresh, I am having to use other identifiers. I basically want Robot to input text into a field next to my indicated identifier.

https://vgy.me/3YBIgl.png

I want text to be inputted to the user: field and using the "user:" as the locator to work with. It works with xpaths, but I would rather use another method which wont be so brittle.

Here is the HTML used to generate the form

<tbody id="m8DPe" class="z-rows">
<tr id="m8DPf" style="background:#FFFFFF;" class="z-row">
    <td id="m8DPg-chdextr" style="background:#FFFFFF;text-align:left;" class="z-row-inner">
        <div id="m8DPg-cell" class="z-row-content">
            <span id="m8DPg" class="z-label">User:</span>
        </div>
    </td>
    <td id="m8DPh-chdextr" style="background:#FFFFFF;text-align:left;" class="z-row-inner">
        <div id="m8DPh-cell" class="z-row-content">
            <input id="m8DPh" class="z-textbox" value="" type="text" name="j_username">
        </div>
    </td>
</tr>
<tr id="m8DPi" style="background:#FFFFFF;" class="z-row z-grid-odd">
    <td id="m8DPj-chdextr" style="background:#FFFFFF;text-align:left;" class="z-row-inner">
        <div id="m8DPj-cell" class="z-row-content">
        <span id="m8DPj" class="z-label">Password:</span>
        </div>
    </td>
    <td id="m8DPk-chdextr" style="background:#FFFFFF;text-align:left;" class="z-row-inner">
        <div id="m8DPk-cell" class="z-row-content">
            <input id="m8DPk" class="z-textbox" value="" type="password" name="j_password">
        </div>
    </td>
</tr>

I know it would be something similar to this:

Input Text    //tr[contains(text(), 'Example') and ...]    ${USERNAME}

But I honestly do not know. Is there somewhere I could read up on this?

I am extremely new to Robot Framework. Sorry for the noobness.

Answer 1

Looking at the sample, the name attribute for the input doesn'the look randomly generated. If that's really so, you could use the most trivial Selenium locator strategy by name, e.g.:

Input Text    name=j_username    ${USERNAME}

If that's not the case, this can be accomplished through an xpath:

//tr[//span[text()="User:"]/td//input

That reads (right-to-left for clearness, though it's evaluated LTR): return the input, which is inside a td (a cell), which itself is a direct child of a tr (a table row), having a span with that text (exact match here).

Thus, the locator will find the row having cell with "User:" in it, and will return the input in it.