How to identify a given WebElement is before or after another WebElement using Java Selenium?

Question

I want to write a reusable function/method which I can use to check whether a given WebElement is before/after another WebElement

The signature should look like follows:

public boolean isAfter(WebElement first, WebElement second)//returns true if the second is after first else false

Does the Selenium have an API that can allow achieving the scenario? Note that my teammates would be using this function in their respective projects. So my function wouldn't know how HTML in actual looks like to take any other path.

Answer 1

Point point=driver.findElement(By.id("something")).getLocation();
System.out.println("X Position : "point.x);
System.out.println("Y Position : "point.y);

This will let u find the position of an element in the entire Page . So if a.y>b.y we can say b is after a ( means below a).

Let me know if this is what you meant

Answer 2

If this is about the DOM...

Xpath is your friend and this (relative addressing) is the main case where you choose to use xpath over css (css being often preferred for readability.

The key feature that you can use here is relative addressing

More info at https://www.toolsqa.com/selenium-webdriver/choosing-effective-xpath/

Key info from that link:

Absolute xpath: /html/body/div[2]/div/div/footer/section[3]/div/ul/li[3]/a

Relative xpath: //*[@id=’social-media’]/ul/li[3]/a

Absolute xpath uses a single slash at the start of the xpath and relative uses a double slash.

Using this info you should be able to put together the method you need.