How To Handle Drop Down in Selenium WebDriver

Handling Drop Down in Selenium WebDriver seems so tedious but WebDriver API has gifted us with one class Select. By using this class we can handle Drop Down in Selenium WebDriver quite easily.

If you want to learn more about Selenium WebDriver then I would suggest you read all the articles from Selenium WebDriver page.
So let’s start with small part of HTML code

<select name="height">
<option value="3">3ft</option>
<option value="4">4ft</option>
<option value="5">5ft</option>
<option value="6">6ft</option>
</select>

Open any of the text editors and paste above HTML code and save this file as <name>.htm. We will be using the above HTML file to perform all action on drop down.

If we observe carefully then we will see that the above HTML code is having “select” HTML tag. For such WebElement Selenium has given Select class.

Select Class in WebDriver has many methods and function that interacts with Drop Down.
so let see how we should handle drop down

So here is the list of all methods and Constructor that can be used in Selenium WebDriver

Select Class Constructor
Select(WebElement element)

So to initialize its object we need to call it like this

Select select = new Select (WebElement wb)

Here WebElement is an interface defined in Selenium API which extends “SearchText” and “TakeScreenShot” class, which represent HTML element and it provides all the operation to interact with an element on an HTML Page.

Here User is provided with three options to select options from the dropdown.

• Selecting Dropdown Option using Visible Text: So if we are taking reference from above HTML code then we can see that following are the visible text as a dropdown option
  3ft, 4ft, 5ft and 6ft and if we want to select 5ft option in that case we need to write it like this
  objectOfSelect.selectByVisibleText(“5ft”) So final code would be something like this

select.selectByVisibleText("5ft");

• Selecting Dropdown Option using Index: In this, we can select the dropdown option using an index. But we need to remember that index of any dropdown starts from 0 so if there are 4 options in any dropdown then there would be following index 0, 1,2,3
  So the index of the first option would be 0 and similarly index of the second option would be 1 and so on and so forth. So if the user wants to select the 2nd option from the dropdown, then he needs to provide the index 1 (Always remember that this method takes int value). So the code will look like this

select.selectByIndex(1);

• Selecting Dropdown Option using Value: In this, we can select any option, using value attributes value. So if we want to select 4ft in provided HTML. In that case, we need to call value of value attribute and that is 4. So the code will look like this

  select.selectByValue("4");

  At the same time, if we want to validate option selected is correct or not for the same we have one method getFirstSelectedOption() and it will return the detail of selected option and to fetch the text we can call method getText(). So the code would look like
  

  select.getFirstSelectedOption().getText()

  so above line of code will return the text of select dropdown option and If you want to learn about the assertion in Selenium then I would suggest you, read these two post
  How to use assertEquals() in WebDriver using driver.getText()

  assertTrue(message,condition) in Selenium WebDriver and it’s implementation

@Test
	public void test()
	{
	driver.get("C:/Users/kaushal/Desktop/Size_DropDown.htm");
	/*to get options of drop down we would use name=height attribute that is given in above code

	*/
	Select select = new Select(driver.findElement(By.name("height")));
	//finding the number of option using size() function
	int i =select.getOptions().size();
	//printing the size
	System.out.print("number of options ="+i);
	//verifying number of option is 4
	assertEquals(4, select.getOptions().size());
	// selecting option in Drop-down using Visible Text
	select.selectByVisibleText("5ft");
	assertEquals("5ft", select.getFirstSelectedOption().getText());

	//selecting option in Drop-down using value attribute
	select.selectByValue("4");
	assertEquals("4ft", select.getFirstSelectedOption().getText());

	//selecting option in Drop-down using value attribute
	select.selectByIndex(1);
	assertEquals("4ft", select.getFirstSelectedOption().getText());

	/*verifying the options of drop down first we would put all value in one list and then we would add all value fetched from instance of Select Class that we have used before in code in another array list and then we would verify the value*/
	//first string type list that would contain all option value
	List list = Arrays.asList(new String[]{"3ft",
	"4ft", "5ft","6ft"});
	List  list1 = new ArrayList();
	//adding all option captured by select in to list1 arraylist
	for(WebElement element:select.getOptions())
	{
	list1.add(element.getText());
	}
	//to see what is being added to arraylist use this code
	int j = list1.size();
	System.out.println("value entered in J ="+j);
	for(int k = 1; k<j; k++)
	{
	System.out.println(list1.get(k));
	}
	Assert.assertArrayEquals(list.toArray(), list1.toArray());

	}

Similarly, the “Select” class has an equal number of methods to deselect the option from the dropdown.

1- DeselectAll: this option is used to deselect all options selected in dropdown. Here is code

select.deselectAll();

2. DeselectByVisibleText: This option is used to deselect selected option using visible text and this can be used like this.

// to deselect 5ft option using visible text
select.deselectByVisibleText("5ft");

3. DeselectByIndex: This method is used to deselect the selected option using the index.

//this method will take int as argument
select.deselectByIndex(2);

4. DeselectByValue:  This method is used to deselect the selected dropdown option using the value of the value attribute.

select.deselectByValue("5");

Before exiting from this post, Check how good you are in Selenium WebDriver by taking this Selenium WebDriver Quiz.

Above code has used JUnit Testing framework. But above code, you can use in Java Main and Using TestNG as well.