Overview of WebDriver and WebElement Interface in Selenium

• WebDriver is an interface and extends SearchContext Interface, which declares two methods findElement and findElements Methods (FindElement/FindElements in above image).
• WebDriver has many abstract methods like: get(String url), close(), quit(),getTitle(), getCurrentUrl etc.
• RemoteWebDriver class which implements WebDriver Interface, this class implement all the methods in WebDriver including findElement and findElements.
• ChromeDriver Class extends ChromiumDriver Class which further extends RemoteWebDriver class.
• And finally, IEDriver, SafariDriver and FirefoxDriver classes directly extends RemoteWebDriver class.
• Click here to view complete source code implementation and for selenium java APIs visit here.

When we say WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

We can access all methods using ChromeDriver instance.

Below is the image for the same :

3. WebElement Interface

Now, let’s explore WebElement Interface:

•  As explained on Selenium Official Site a WebElement represents HTML element.
• The interface also extends SearchContext, TakesScreenshot interfaces.
• In general, whatever we see in the HTML page is a WebElement whether it’s a link, search-text, button, Drop-Down, Web-Table etc. So, we can say that every action on a Web-Page while automating your Web Application will have to go through WebElement interface.

WebElement element = driver.findElement(by);

package com.example.automation;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;

import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;

import java.util.List;

/**

* @author Mandeep Kaur

* @Date 21 April,2020

*/

public class SeleniumConfig {

public static void main(String[] args) {

String path = System.getProperty(“user.dir”);

System.setProperty(“webdriver.chrome.silentOutput”, “true”);

System.setProperty(“webdriver.chrome.driver”, path + “/chromedriver”);

WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

driver.get(“http://newtours.demoaut.com/”);

WebElement userNameObj = driver.findElement(By.name(“userName”));

userNameObj.sendKeys(“sva”);

WebElement userPasswordObj = driver.findElement(By.name(“password”));

userPasswordObj.sendKeys(“123”);

WebElement loginObj = driver.findElement(By.name(“login”));

loginObj.click();

// get all the elements tag name a

List<WebElement> allLinksObj = driver.findElements(By.tagName(“a”));

// get the total count of elements

int linkCounts = allLinksObj.size();

for (int i = 0; i < linkCounts; i++) {

System.out.println(allLinksObj.get(i).getText());

}

driver.close();

}

}

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