Selenium locator for <label for=“x”>

Question

With ASP.NET the tag IDs are pretty volatile so to make my tests more robust I want to locate elements by their label texts. I have played some with WatiN and it does this perfectly but that project seem kind of dead nowadays so I thought I'd look into Selenium as well before I decide on a framework.

I have html that looks something like this

<label for="ctl00_content_loginForm_ctl01_username">Username</label>:
<input type="text" id="ctl00_content_loginForm_ctl01_username" />

I don't want to type:

selenium.Type("ctl00_content_loginForm_ctl01_username", "xxx");

That is too reliant on the ID. In WatiN I'd write:

browser.TextField(Find.ByLabelText("Username")).TypeText("xxx");

Is there a way to do this in Selenium?

Answer 1

I believe you can do this with the following:

selenium.Type(selenium.getAttribute("//label[text()='Username']/@for"), "xxx");

The text()='Username' bit gets the label you want by its innerHTML, then the /@for gives you back the value of its "for" attribute.

Heads up: this is not tested (apologies for that!) but I think it'll work, based on some tooling around in the IDE plugin

Answer 2

This works:

//input[@id=(//label[text()="Username"]/@for)]

Explanation: Since you are looking for the input:

//input[@id=("ctl00_content_loginForm_ctl01_username")]

replace the "ctl00_content_loginForm_ctl01_username" by the attribute's value of the label:

//label[text()="Username"]/@for

Answer 3

Ok, this may be a year old but what they hey. This will select the first input under a label containing the text 'Username'.

//label[text()='Username']/input

I generally prefer using contains() as I find that some browsers are adding annoying spaces into the occasional element:

//label[contains(., 'Username')]/input

Note that the single slash before input denotes it will only look one level down, where the double slash would check all levels under the label. Use XPather for Firefox to create and check your XPaths, it's very useful.

Answer 4

Yes, you can use XPath, CSS or DOM locators to identify your element. In this example your XPath could look like //lable[@for='ctl00_content_loginForm_ctl01_username'] to identify that particular label.