Introduction to driver.getPageSource() and perform assertion on text present on web page

Dwarika Dhish Mishra

May 22, 2013

Might be most of you would have used it in your day to day scripting or if not then don’t worry I am trying to make it chew-able that would finally get digested well.

People who has started learning Selenium would be familiar with Selenium RC and hoping would be familiar with Selenium IDE. In RC and IDE we have option to validate or verify any text on the page by using methods like

selenium.isTextPresent();

or in IDE we normally select the text and by right-clicking we normally add assert or verify method for specific text. But Selenium 2(WebDriver) doesn’t have any direct method to find the text and also doesn’t have any assertion associated with it. But still, we have many things to work with.
there is one method in Selenium2 getPageSource(), it fetches all the source of a specific webpage and that can be used to verify the text on the page

Suppose there is one webpage where there is one string “Selenium is Browser automation tool”.

Here we can find it two way

1st Method

assertEquals("Selenium is Browser automation tool", driver.findElement(By.xpath("Xpath of the element")).getText()).

By using this we would be able to find that text is available or not if it is not then the script will fail here otherwise it will get passed

Method 2:

This is most popular one to fulfill our requirement. but the result that come is in Boolean

Boolean b =  driver.getPageSource().contains("Selenium is Browser automation tool").

its result will appear in true or false and this is further used to implement some condition while writing scripts.

Main use of this Method
1- To find the text on the page
2- to find the pop up by some text on it.

In coming post I will show you how we handle the pop-up by using text on it.

16 responses to “Introduction to driver.getPageSource() and perform assertion on text present on web page”

sudhirbhat

May 22, 2013

Hi,

This is a very nice post and very interesting. i have some queries..I am requesting you to answer them.

1. How to continue the test execution after a failed test. [ like if i have 10 things to test and if 5th one is a fail, selenium comes out of it !!!]
2. is it possible to reduce the execution speed in web driver?
3. How to change the windows handler in C#?
4. is it possible to carry out the test execution in multiple browsers [ like from test 1 to 10, 1st all in IE, then in chrome etc. ]

Thanks in Advance,

Sudhir Bhat

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1. Dwarika Dhish Mishra
  
  May 22, 2013
  
  Thank you commenting with such load of many useful questions.
  I am trying to answer your all question in nutshell.
  
  1- If you really want to execute your script without stopping execution of script than why not you are trying try and catch like this
  
  Suppose you are trying to assert some element on webpage and due to some reason elements are not get loaded on time and due to this assertion get failed than
  
  try
  {
  assertTrue(driver.findElement(By.xpath(“xpath of your element”)).isDisplayed())
  }
  catch(Exception e)
  {
  e.printStackTrace();
  }
  
  so in this case if your assertion get failed than it will show the exception message and script will continue its execution
  
  2- As such in WebDriver there is no such methods like that of Selenium RC …but if you want to slow down the speed of execution than why not you are trying
  Thread.sleep();
  or driver.wait(40000); here time is in milisecond
  or if you really want to wait for some element or some time for the script than try
  Implicit wait
  to read more about implicit wait try this link
  
  http://abodeqa.com/2013/03/12/implicit-wait-in-webdriver/
  
  3- Since I am familiar with Java so I am just showing you the methodology to handle it in java might be you will learn it and reciprocate the same in yourC# script
  
  There is one simple way
  a) by using name (keep all window handling in Try and Catch)
  
  String parentwindow= driver.getWindowHandle();
  
  by using this you would be able to handle the parent window
  
  now its time to handle the pop-up
  
  try
  {
  driver.switchTo().window(“Name of the window”);
  
  }
  catch(NoSuchWindowException e) {
  e.printStackTrace();
  }
  
  again if you want to switch back to parent than
  in place of the name of window keep parentwindow.
  
  b) Second method is to fill all pop-up in a list/set like this
  
  Set allWindows = driver.getWindowHandles();
  if(!allWindows.isEmpty()) {
  for (String windowId : allWindows) {
  do the requsite action
  }
  
  4) Please go through my post http://abodeqa.com/2013/02/21/how-to-execute-selenium-webdriver-test-cases-parallel-in-multiple-browser-using-testng-parameter-annotation/
  
  this will answer your fourth query.
  
  for more question please write me at dwarika1987@gmail.com
  
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  Reply
shama Ugale

May 25, 2013

Hello ,

for your reply to his first question,
=> if i use try catch block, the test execution is continued but, the test passes , it doesnt fail.

now how to handle this, it shud continue execution even if it fails and also the test shud get failed( in reports).

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1. Dwarika Dhish Mishra
  
  May 25, 2013
  
  Actually in above code I have forget to mention the failed message
  
  like this in try
  {
  driver.switchTo().window(“Name of the window”);
  
  }
  catch(NoSuchWindowException e) {
  e.printStackTrace();
  // to find the notification of failed test
  System.out.println(“You test failed and check the code”)
  }
  
  Above is the one option to find the message related to Failed Test Case
  
  or for better understanding you may use this code, In this we would write one function in which we will pass two parameter
  public class Verification extends SeleneseTestBase{
  
  private StringBuffer verificationerrors;
  
  public CustomVerification()
  {
  verificationErrors = new StringBuffer();
  }
  
  public void verifyTrue(String msg, driver.findElement(By.xpath(“xpath of certain element”)).isDisplayed())
  {
  try
  {
  Assert.assertTrue(driver.findElement(By.xpath(“xpath of certain element”)).isDisplayed());
  }
  catch(Error e)
  {
  verificationErrors.append(e);
  Reporter.log(msg + “
  “);
  
  }
  
  }
  
  Use above function in your coming test..Might be this code will help you in getting better understanding in handling such cases
  
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  Reply
Renuka

January 17, 2014

Hi Dhwarika..
Iam new to selenium web driver.Your providing excellent information i’ve to appreciate for that.I’ve some queries.
1). How to handle alerts(how to write script for clicking ok/cancel button in the alert , do i need to use if-else block to handle those actions).
2). My page is having 20links with same class name for div and span for all the links.how to click a particular link.could you provide the logic for that

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Suresh Bhavihalli

February 18, 2014

Hi Renuka,
You can click on link using
driver.findElement(By.linkText(“Just give the name of the link”)).click(); irrespective of class, div or span
ex: driver.findElement(By.linkText(“Gmail”)).click();

@Dhwarika.
Thanks..

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Suresh Bhavihalli

February 18, 2014

Hi Dhwarika..

How can i wait for text on page using implicit wait?
In my case I am waiting for a text to be appear on the page and i am using
driver.getPageSource().contains(element);

here element is text on the page. As i am testing 1000 of applications I dont want to go with
new WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(ExpectedConditions.presenceOfElementLocated(By.id/linktext/ect(element)));

any other tricks ?

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1. Dwarika Dhish Mishra
  
  February 18, 2014
  
  @Suresh
  
  We have other options too like you can use Thread.sleep(time in milisecond). But Explicit wait is really good synchronization method and this really justify its significance becuase suppose your element take 10 second and you have given something like 5 second as wait then most probably your script is going to fail and in second case if you have given 15 second as wait then you are wasting 5 second because your element is taking just 10 second(Even this is very big time for any prompt site).
  
  So Explicit wait gives a way to handle such problem because it will wait for the same time as element is taking to load in to DOM.
  
  So i would suggest use explicit wait that you have written here as line of code but if you dont want to use this then you have other option to use Thread.sleep(time).
  
  Hope I have answered your query.
  
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  Reply
sumeet

April 22, 2014

Hi,

Really nice article, very informative for me.

I want to ask one thing at this point, how can we execute test script from my java project.
Suppose, if there is a button in my project, then how can I execute test script on click of that button inside my java project?

Let me know, if anything not clear in my question.

Thanks in advance.

Thannks,
Sumeet.

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1. Dwarika Dhish Mishra
  
  April 22, 2014
  
  @Sumeet can you tell me more detail, what you really want to know !!
  
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  1. sumeet
    
    April 23, 2014
    
    Hi,
    
    I want to execute appium test script on a button click event in my java project.
    How can I do this thing?
    
    Thanks,
    Sumeet.
    
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    Reply
Deepthi

May 6, 2014

In my framework i have a package called genericlib where in i have kept all the reusable methods like method to fetch data from excel and webdriver specific methods(like functions to perform click,type,mousehover and so on).I ve a dedicated class known as Driver which provides the driver instance(presently i ve a static variable WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(); in the driver class) which gives me only ff browser. i want to make this static variable still more generic so that it provides browser instance of IE and Chrome also.Please guide me in this.Thanks in advance

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Gaurav Khurana

April 5, 2017

Good one. Second method is good when the text is present only once in the source code. It can create a confusion if someone later adds a second text. In that case it will still pass but we will not be sure, which text we validated

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Logeshwari

September 18, 2019

Hi,

I want to check some string in pagesource if it find means then that entire line should be print. Selenium have this option to print..

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