Selenium Dynamic Selectors for WebElements

Question

I am building a testing framework, my objective is to test many websites that have similar pages with light difference between each other using this framework.

I have an issue where I want WebElements Selectors to be dynamic, which means that I want to pass the way I want to find the element as a parameter to FindElement method.

I am trying to build something like this:

public class WebComponent
        {
            public int ID { get; set; }
            public string Name { get; set; }
            public string Description { get; set; }
            public IWebElement WebElement{get;set;}
            public Accessor Accessor { get; set; }
            public WebComponent()
            {
                Accessor = new Accessor();
            }

}
public class Accessor
{
    OpenQA.Selenium.By By { get; set; }
    public string Value { get; set; }
}

And later in my code when I want to have instance of this class:

WebComponent component = new WebComponent();
component.ID = 1;
component.Name = "Logout Button";
component.Description = "The button to click when user wants to logout of website";
component.Accessor.By = By.Id;
component.Accessor.Value = "logout";
component.WebElement = Browser.Driver.FindElement(//missing code);

My question is how can I find the WebElement using component.Accessor, any advice or suggested edits will be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Advice would be not to split Value and By in your Accessor class. Id is not a property of By class of selenium. Id is a method with parameters, so you can't invoke it as you did:

component.Accessor.By = By.Id;

Connect value and By in Accessor class - you don't have to complicate things that doesn't need to be complicate.

Your accessor class could look like this:

public class Accessor
{
    public By By { get; set;}
}

And then you would initialize By like that:

Accessor.By = By.Id("logout");

And then your locating method part could look like this:

component.WebElement = Browser.Driver.FindElement(component.Accessor.By);

If you still want to stick with your way - try reflection. Some ideas could be found here: stackoverflow link to similar question.