Identification of the correct GUI element on a web page is a prerequisite for creating any successful automation script. It is where locators come into the picture. Locators are one of the essential components of Selenium infrastructure, which help Selenium scripts in uniquely identifying the WebElements(such as text box, button, etc.) present on the web page. So, how do we get the values of these locators? SelectorsHub is Next-generation XPath and CSS selectors which is invented and created by Sanjay Kumar.
Before inventing this tool, Chropath was introduced and it was one of the best in the industry to find XPath and CSS locators. This is very easy to understand and use. There are tons of blogs and videos already out there to help start with. It is supported in almost all popular browsers like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, and Opera. Recently Sanjay introduced support for TOR and Brave as well.
When I started my career in Test Automation, I used to use firebug and fire path combination to locate XPath and CSS, but now those are obsolete and later chropath came into the limelight and then people started using chrome dev tools as well, and now SelectosHub is the best tool I have ever used for all your locator problems. It has so many features which we haven’t seen in any other XPath and CSS Selectors IDE. This can be easily downloaded from the chrome webstore.
As far as I know, the best practices say, While working with XPath or CSS locators, one should avoid directly using the one generated by the Chrome Dev Tools. It may seem one of the easiest ways to generate XPath, but in the long run, it induces reliability issues, code breakage, maintainability issues, etc. It may look tempting to use these, but you would be better off creating your own customized XPath, in the long run, using SelectorsHub.
I like this tool a lot because it supports almost all the required features for a test engineers as shown below.
And recently Sanjay added few more awesome features to the tool as listed below in this picture. For more details you can see here.
Currently why I am writing this post is to help and support this project to the fullest by doing a little donation here.
By donating, get extra privileges as well from Sanjay. On being SelectorsHub Patron, you will receive a unique key from Sanjay. This key you will have to use as shown in the video and you will be able to hide the footer banner and will get a better clean view of SelectorsHub. There are multiple options to donate as shown below, feel free to go here and look at options.
Hope this helps Sanjay with his bread and butter and to grow this project to new heights and help all test engineers out there with this amazing piece of software.
In this article, I gave you a brief intro and a lot of links. Testing should make your life easier. I can help you Overshoot Your Goals in the Right Ways, head over to my profile here – https://testwitharjun.com/about/ to get more info.
Thanks for reading!!!