Selenium Api, Selenium locators and regex

Question

In my page I have some ids like "foo:searchResults12345" that are composed of a static part ("foo:searchResults" and a dynamic rendered one - one or more numbers. I want to retrieve every id that contains the static part "foo:searchResults", ignoring the dynamic one. I am thinking at using regex for the pattern text, but the problem is that I cannot find any method in Selenium Api to help me with this, such as selenium.getAllIdsInPage(). Anybody had the same problem and figured out a solution?

Answer 1

I would recommend combining getXpathCount with a loop to iterate through each match. For example the following xpath should return the total number of matching nodes when used with getXpathCount

//*[starts-with(@id, 'foo:searchResults')]

You should then be able to loop through each match using the following example XPath:

/descendant::*[starts-with(@id, 'foo:searchResults')][1]

Where 1 would be replaced by the current count in the loop.

Below is an example in Java that should print the matching IDs to system.out:

@Test
public void outputDynamicIds() {
    selenium.open("http://www.example.com/");
    int elementCount = selenium.getXpathCount("//*[starts-with(@id, 'foo:searchResults')]").intValue();
    for (int i = 1; i < elementCount+1; i++) {
        System.out.println(selenium.getAttribute("/descendant::*[starts-with(@id, 'foo:searchResults')][" + i + "]@id"));
    }
}