It is not always the best solution to declare page fragments via public @IdentifyUsing method.
Sometimes it is necessary to find a certain fragment programmatically:
- Maybe the fragment is only used in very special cases and should therefore not be public...
- Maybe you need a list of fragments fitting certain parameters which can not be expressed with CSS or XPath..
- Or maybe are just prototyping your approach and don't want to implement page objects, yet...
For these cases the Ad-Hoc finding API was developed.
This API can be accessed through a Browser, Page or a PageFragment.
Depending on where the API is accessed the search context for fragments might differ:
Browser: The whole HTML page is searched for the fragment.Page: The whole HTML page is searched for the fragment.PageFragment: The area between the page fragment's open and close tags is searched for the fragment.
There are several ways to start finding fragments, here are a few examples:
// find an element by it's ID 'fooId' as a generic element
GenericElement element = getBrowser()
.find("#fooId");
// find many elements by their shared CSS class 'foo' as a stream of generic elements
Stream<GenericElement> elements = getBrowser()
.findMany(".foo");
// find an element by it's ID 'textField' as a text field (identifier first)
TextField textField = getBrowser()
.findBy(id("textField"))
.as(TextField.class);
// find an element by it's ID 'textField' as a text field (class first)
TextField textField = getBrowser()
.find(TextField.class)
.by(id("textField"));
// find all all elements with the CSS class 'foo'
// within an element with ID 'group' as a stream of text fields
Stream<TextField> textFields = getBrowser()
.find("#group")
.findBy(css(".foo"))
.asMany(TextField.class);