Im unable to locate the element to enter the text in the txt box in c#

Question

i tried using xpath, Id to find elements. even though im getting the error "unable to locate the element" please can anyone help?

HTML Snippet

<input type="text" value="" maxlength="256" id="FileLeafRef_8553196d-ec8d-4564-9861-3dbe931050c8_$onetidIOFile" title="Name Required Field" class="ms-long" size="35">

C# Code

driver.FindElement(By.Id("FileLeafRef_8553196d-ec8d-4564-9861-3dbe931050c8_$onetidIOFile")).SendKeys("Newprojecttest");

Answer 1

You can use any of the below mentioned way to select that particular element.

driver.FindElement(By.Xpath("//input[@title='Name Required Field']")).sendKeys("Newprojecttest");

OR

driver.FindElement(By.Xpath("//input[starts-with(@Id,'FileLeafRef')]")).sendKeys("Newprojecttest");

Hope it helps!

Answer 2

You can try different selectors based on existing value of attributes that do not change or to use a selector based on a fixed part of the attribute.

Here are some css selectors that you can try:

input[id*='FileLeafRef']
input[id*='onetidIOFile']
input[title*='Name']
input[title='Name Required Field']

Answer 3

I recommend using a CSS selector, yours would look something like:

var element = driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector("input.ms-long"));
element.SendKeys("Newprojecttest");

Hope this helps

Answer 4

This is just a guess based on the HTML you provided, but is the ID different each time the page is loaded? This seems likely based on the fact that the ID contains a GUID.

If that's the case, my recommendation would be to use XPath as follows:

driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//input[contains(@id,'FileLeafRef')]")).SendKeys("Newprojecttest");

This will locate the first element on the page whose ID contains "FileLeafRef", so even if the GUID is unique each time the page is loaded, the target element will be found.

Note that if there are multiple text inputs that have similar IDs, you will have to get more specific.

Alternatively, if the @title attribute is unique among elements on the page, you could use that as well since it is nice and clean:

driver.FindElement(By.XPath("//input[@title='Name Required Field']")).SendKeys("Newprojecttest");

Answer 5

in some times you will face this type of problems to find the elements, at that time you can try different methods, mostly it will work for

driver.findelement(By.name("xxxx")).click();

By.name will work most of the times, same i have faced and resolved with these name locator.