Difference between findElement and findElements Method

Posted By : Anuj Gupta | 19-Nov-2018
testing

Selenium WebDriver is used to automate a web application and for that, we need to locate the elements on the web page. We can use different locators as per our requirement to find the element. So, let's discuss about the two methods to find elements on a webpage:

 

1) findElement() method

  • To access single web element on a webpage, we use findElement() method and it returns the first matching element.
  • It throws NoSuchElementException exception when it fails to find the element.

Syntax:

driver.findElement(By.xpath("Value of Xpath"));

 

2) findElements() method

  • In order to handle the bulk of web elements, we use findElements() method.
  • It is used to find bulk of web elements present in webpage and its return type is list of web element i.e. List<Web Element>.
  • This method is present in search context interface.
  • It throws an empty list when it fails to find the web elements.

Syntax:

List wb = driver.findElements(By.xpath("Value of Xpath"));

 

Let's see an example on both methods.

Program for findElement() method

package Selenium; 

import org.openqa.selenium.By;  

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;  

import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement; 

import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver; 

public class Test { 

    public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException  

    {  

        System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "/home/anuj/chromedriver"); 

        WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(); 

        driver.manage().window().maximize(); 

        driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS); 

        driver.get("https://datatables.net/examples/basic_init/filter_only.html"); 

       WebElement new = driver.findElement(By.name(“q”)).click(); 

     } 

}

 

Program for findElements() method

package Selenium; 

 import java.awt.Font; 

import java.util.List; 

import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit; 

 import org.openqa.selenium.By; 

import org.openqa.selenium.JavascriptExecutor; 

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver; 

import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement; 

import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver; 

import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeOptions; 

import org.openqa.selenium.remote.DesiredCapabilities; 

import org.openqa.selenium.remote.server.handler.GetTitle; 

 import com.gargoylesoftware.htmlunit.javascript.host.URL; 

  

public class Test { 

    public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException  

    {  

        System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "/home/anuj/chromedriver"); 

        WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(); 

        driver.manage().window().maximize(); 

             

            driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS); 

            driver.get("https://datatables.net/examples/basic_init/filter_only.html"); 

 

            //Get Row Count 

            List rowCount = driver.findElements(By.tagName("tr")); 

            rowCount.size(); 

 

            //Get Column Count 

            List colCount = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//thead//th")); 

            colCount.size(); 

             

            System.out.println("Row count :" + rowCount); 

            System.out.println("Col count :" + colCount); 

             

          //To print table Data 

  

            for(WebElement tdata:driver.findElements(By.tagName("tr"))) 

            { 

            System.out.println(tdata.getText()); 

        } 

             driver.quit(); 

    } 

}

 

 

In the above example, findElement() method simply locate targeted web element and print the result in the console while findElements() method will locate the bulk of web elements present in the webpage at once and it will simply targeted those elements which are present in the xpath locator.

 

Conclusion:

findElement() and findElements() methods help in locating a web element or a group of elements which have the same properties. It also helps in interaction which utimately creates a bridge between a web page, test data and executes test automation script. Nowadays, we are using findElement() method commonly in our web driver software test case.

Related Tags
QA
Quality Assurance

About Author

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Anuj Gupta

Anuj is a passionate QA engineer and an optimistic person. He is fond of playing Chess and Basketball. He always comes up with the new ideas and is a good team player.

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