Understanding and Writing Page Object in Selenium

Let’s first quickly understand the concept of page object before jumping in and writing it. Page object to be concise, creating a relationship between each and every test method we execute, which can be done by returning page object in every method we call. This will ensure that our test execution is happening on the right page rather waiting for some object (UI) in a wrong page. Well the above description sounds weird, since we are expecting a method to return object of page to perform another operation, but how to do that and how does it looks ? Let’s consider we have a scenario like this, we have to login in our AUT (Application Under Test) and hit settings page and perform email configuration of Admin and check the logged in user got admin privilege. Well, this can be done simply by writing methods for each and every operation mentioned and call them in sequence (Which is done more often) and perform operation, but the downside of this way of operation is

• What if the page in sequence not loaded
• What if the AUT landing in wrong page (rather landing in settings page, if it lands in logout page)
• How to manage objects (UI object) of all pages
• Duplication of code (functionalities)

In order to cope the above problems, page objects can be used. Let’s see them as an example

  public class Login
    {
        public Login Login(string user)
        {
            //Perform some operation of login
            //Return Login Reference
            return new Login();
        }
    }

    public class Settings
    {
        public Settings settings(string SettingType)
        {
            //Perform some operation
            //Return settings
            return new Settings();
        }
    }

    public class EmailConfig
    {
        public EmailConfig EmailConfiguration(string configType)
        {
            //Return Email config
            return new EmailConfig();
        }
    }

    public class TestClass
    {
        public void testCreateEmailConfig()
        {
            Login log = new Login();
            Settings userSetting = log.Settings("Admin");
            EmailConfig config = userSetting.EmailConfiguration("Admin");
        }
    }

As you all could see from the above C# code snippet, we are creating separate class for each and every page and writing functionalities which those page provide in the same class itself and also each page will return the reference of the Type of the page, this makes us even more comfortable to make sure we are performing operations on the correct page. Well, whatever we have seen so far is how we can create classes based on the functionalities within a page, now let’s see how we can write objects within a page. Objects for a page can be identified by either ID, CSS, XPath, LinkText etc, hence the object in the Page Object pattern can be written by referencing the namespace using OpenQA.Selenium.Support.PageObjects and the objects can decorated using annotations in square brackets as shown below

//User Name
[FindsBy(How = How.ID, Using = "UserName")]
public IWebElement txtUserName { get; set; }

//Password
[FindsBy(How = How.ID, Using = "Password")]
public IWebElement txtPassword { get; set; }

//LoginWidget
[FindsBy(How = How.XPath, Using = ".//div[@widget-name='Login']//table]")]
public IWebElement wdLogin { get; set; }

As shown in the above code, the UserName and Password textbox are identified using ID and Widget has been identified using Xpath. The FindsBy is an attribute found under using OpenQA.Selenium.Support.PageObjects namespace. The attribute has named parameter type such as CustomFinderType, How, Priority and Using. The How is an enumeration type and has following Once all the objects are written in the Page object class (Here Login class), we need to first initialize the Page object using InitElements method of PageFactory class. The code to initialize the object can be written like the one shown below

PageFactory.InitElements(driver, new Login); // Driver is the instance variable of FF driver

Here is how the Login class will looks like

public class Login
{

        public static void LoginAdmin()
        {
            LoginPageObject ObjectLogin = new LoginPageObject();
            //User Name
            ObjectLogin.txtUserName.SendKeys("admin");
            //Password
            ObjectLogin.txtPassword.SendKeys("admin");
        }
}

The intelli-sense will give us the entire object as shown This will give us the understanding and overview of how to work with Page Object. Thanks, Karthik KK