Testing ASP.NET sites using master pages with Selenium

Question

What is a good approach to avoiding Selenium tests being broken when dealing with the changing "Name" and "Id" attributes of a control that is rendered on a ASP.NET page using a master page? I want to avoid changing my tests when ASP.NET renders the web page's controls with different DOM identifiers.

Answer 1

http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/AutomatedTestingOfASPNETWebApplicationsUsingSelenium.aspx

Selenium solves this problem using XPATH and providing the ability to locate controls based on XPATH expressions, alleviating the need to hard code HTML tag structure into a test script. For example, the ASP.NET runtime may render ID attributes that look like:

id="ctl00_cphContents_gridMaint_DataGrid"

Finding this control using an XPATH expression can be simplified to something like this:

table[contains(@id, "gridMaint")]

In the event the nesting of the DataGrid changes the script will continue to function properly as long as table's ID contains the text "gridMaint".

Answer 2

Another option is to use CSS locators. They're normally less fragile than XPath. For example, to target a div with a class of .myDiv you can use the locator "css=.myDiv". If the specified element has other classes the CSS locator will still work, although the XPath equivalent would change from "//div[@class='myDiv']" to "//div[contains(@class, 'myDiv']". Also, CSS locators tend to be faster than XPath across browsers.