WebDriver-Partial Link Text locator

WebDriver-Partial Link Text locator

In selenium WebDriver, there is an additional way to find a web link element with the help of partial link text locator.

The partial link text is used to identify the web link element only, based on their part of the link text.

Partial Link text locators cannot be used for other than link elements.

The Syntax of the partial Link Text locator is as below:

driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText(“value of partial link text”)) ;

Note: The partial link text and link text both are used to identify the web link element on the web application. The difference between link text and partial link text is that the link text is used for an exact match of the text value, and partial link text is used for some portion of the long text value of the web link.

Points that have to remember:

• Whenever multiple links are there with a similar text, then the link text and partial link text will take the help of other locators like XPath and CSS selector.
• Both partial and link text are case sensitive.
• Partial and link text can also be used inside and outside block of an element.

Let us see one sample test case in which we will try to locate the web link element using partial link text locators and automate the following scenarios:

Steps	Actions	Input	Expected Result
1.	Open the Google Chrome browser.		The Google Chrome browser should be opened.
2.	Navigate to the tutorial and example website.	https://www.tutorialandexample.com	The Tutorial and example home page must be displayed.
3.	Identify the interview question tutorial link.		An interview question page must be opened.
4.	Close the Browser.		The Browser should be closed.

• After launching the Eclipse, we will open the existing test suite new_test, which we have created in earlier sessions of the WebDriver tutorial.
• And then, right-click on the src folder and create a new Class File from New ? Class.

• And now, we will save the class name as partial_Link_text and click on the Finish button.

Now we will create our test case step by step to have an overview of how to use partial link text locators to identify a particular web element.

Step1:

• To access the Google Chrome browser first, we need to download the Google Chrome driver and set the system property for the Chrome driver.

We have already discussed this in previous sessions of the tutorial. And you can also refer given link "Working with Chrome browser” for a better understanding that how we can download it and set System property for Chrome driver.

// set the system property for chrome browser
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\Users\\JTP\\Downloads\\chromedriver_win32\\chromedriver.exe");
//create the object for chrome driver
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();   

Step2:

After that, we will move to our second step, and navigate to the desired URL,

Here the sample code:

//navigate to the URL
 driver.get("https://www.tutorialandexample.com"); 

Step3:

 Now we are trying to locate the interview questions web link by using the value of its partial link text attribute.

• Right-click on the hyperlink field and select the Inspect option to identify the web link, which is as shown below.

• Notice that the Html code belongs to the hyperlink got highlighted which is as shown in the below snapshot:

• And notice that the above highlighted Html code has a text between the <a>to</a> tags. We are using this text value for the link text locator for locating hyperlinks on the web page.

• Copy the value of partial link text which is present in the <a> ….. </a> tags.

Here the sample code for the first-name hyperlink:

//identify the partial linktext
driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Interview")).click();
Thread.sleep(2000);
System.out.println("first name value is entered"); 

Step 4:

In the last step of our sample test case, we will close the Chrome browser,

The sample code for closing the browser,

//Closing the browser
driver.close();   

Our final test script will look like this:

package testpackage;
 import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;
 import org.openqa.selenium.By;
 import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
 import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
 public class Partial_link_text {
 public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
 //set the system property 
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver","C:\\Users\\JTP\\Downloads\\chromedriver_win32\\chromedriver.exe");
 //creating the object for Chrome driver  
  WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
 driver.manage().window().maximize(); 
 //Navigate to tutorial and example home page
 driver.get("https://www.tutorialandexample.com");
 //identify the web link using partial link text 
 driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Interview")).click();
 Thread.sleep(2000);
 System.out.println("first name value is entered");
 //closing the browser 
 driver.close();
 }
 } 

• To run the test script in Eclipse, right-click on the code and then select Run as ? Java Application.

• The above test script will launch the Google Chrome browser and automate all the test scenarios.