Selenium: Select 2nd item by both class and with certain text?

Question

I am creating some test scripts using Selenium WebDriver in C#. The AUT contains a left menu in which the position/ordering of the links depend upon the 'User Preferences' and a lot of factors/configuration from Admin and user side, so XPath is not an option for me.

I used IDE for recording the same and then generating the code, but by default IDE also used XPath, so I added some commands by myself in recorded script and tried to find the element, with the 'Find' button provided in Selenium IDE. After a couple of tries it worked in IDE, i.e. IDE highlighted the element which I want to find, but when I copied the same code in VSTS it is not working.

This is the code generated by IDE, I am not able to get the reason why this is working in IDE and not in VSTS code, I haven't seen any other command to show such a behavior.

driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector("span:contains(Issues Management)")).Click();

This code throws element not found/similar error when executed in WebDriver but works fine in IDE. I have seen a similar post over SQAForums, but that too doesn't explain it's reason well. I am using Firefox as a browser for creating these tests.

HTML of the element is:

<a class="rpLink rpExpandable" title="MyServices" href="#">
<span class="rpOut">
<span class="rpExpandHandle"></span>
<span class="rpText">
Issues Management
<span class="menuItemRole">Container menu item</span>
</span>
</span>
</a>

The complexity is there can be multiple elements with the same text 'Issues Management' on the page, but as far as I know they will be under a different section/class name.

Answer 1

"contains" isn't a valid css selector, so it won't work (see this CSS Selector Reference). I read somewhere it was part of a draft version of CSS once, but got cut (see here).

Xpath may still be an option; even if the order of elements on the page is uncertain, you can use a partial xpath

driver.findElement(By.xpath("//span[@class='rpText' and text()='Issues Management']")).click();

You can also chain findElements to narrow things down if that doesn't work for some reason

driver.findElement(By.CssSelector("a[title='MyServices']")).findElement(By.xpath(".//span[text()='Issues Management']")).click();

Answer 2

Use [0] for the first instance

This may be due to the seleniumIDE selecting a first instance by default You can achieve this manually with:

CssSelector("span.rpText:contains(Issues Management)")[0]

Also, if the class is unique then use it in the selector, i.e.

css:

driver.
  FindElement(By.CssSelector("span.rpText:contains(Issues Management)")).Click();

xpath:

driver.findElement(By.xpath(
"/descendant::a[@class='post-rpText'][2]:contains('Issues Management')")).click();

Answer 3

Try below XPath:

//span[contains(text(), 'Issues Management')]

Might be it will help you out.